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THE LIGHT OF MENTAL SCIENCE. 






THE 






LIGHT OF MENTAL SCIENCE; 



AN ESSAY ON MOBAL TRAINING. 



i- ..? 



mrsYloudon 



AUTHORESS OF "FIRST LOVE," FORTUNE HUNTING," "DILEMMAS OF 
TRICE," ETC., ETC. 




LONDON: f* 
SMITH, ELDER, AND CO., CORNHILL. 

1845. 






CIT¥ STEAM PRESS, LOXG LANE. 
I). A. DOUDNEY. 



PREFACE. 



All nature's laws are infallible. The regularity of their 
results is nature's oath of allegiance to him who will take 
the trouble of studying her laws and their practical apprer 
ciations. 

This is the knowledge which is power; for this is the 
knowledge which places the inherent forces of the universe, 
physical and intellectual, at the disposal of its possessor. 

The following small volume is the result of ten years' 
anxious and conscientious devotion to this interesting sub- 
ject. 

The system of mental culture it contains, and the practi- 
cal rules for the application of that system which it gives 
in detail, are deduced from the natural laws of mind. 

As all the natural laws are infallible, if we choose to 
adapt those of mind to their legitimate purposes, they can- 
not fail us. This faith, and the clear* light which these 
laws throw on every subject to which they are applied, have 
rendered the task delightful. 



VI PREFACE. 

In the course of this series of essays, and a second now 
preparing for the press, the light of the mental laws, which 
in the first essay assisted us at the cradle, in directing the 
associations of the infant mind, is successively applied to all 
the subjects most important to the mutual relations of the 
whole family of man, till in the last essay of the second 
series, International Parliaments, and International Laws 
framed in the Unlit, are suggested for the pacification and 
civilization of the whole world. For whether we would 
educate, or whether we would legislate, a knowledge of how 
the minds we desire to influence are constructed, is equally 
necessary. 

Marge acta Loudon. 

No. 8, Rue Bo-vale, Paris. 
Sept. 1, 1845. 









A SUMMARY 



Of the Subjects to luhich the Light afforded by the Mental 
Laws, is applied in the course of the following Essays. 

FIRST SERIES. 
IN THE FIRST ESSAY, 

THE LIGHT OF THE MENTAL LAW IS APPLIED 

To arguments in favour of moral training in infants — in children, and 
in institutions for instructing parents, teachers, servants, and all per- 
sons who are to be about children in mental training — To practical 
rules for awaking the sympathies — For developing the affections — For 
fendering Benev dence habitually active — For preventing the formation 
of selfish habits — For exciting veneration, and directing it to the love 
of goodness — For elevating desire of approbation into desire of assi- 
milation with, goodness — For inclining the will to prefer virtue — For 
training the judgment — For- educating the conscience — For govern- 
ing the temper, and for ennobling the character — To showing that 
the power of conceiving and admiring perfection, the instinct which 
delights in admiring the great and good, and the instinct which urges 
assimilation with what we admire, are the characteristics which dis- 
tinguish man from the lower animals, and which, when cultivated, 
pall raise him to his destined rank in the scale of being. 

IN THE SECOND ESSAY 

To arguments showing the necessity for a national system of 
public instruction, based on the moral training described in the first 
essay — To arguments showing why this step should not be delayed — 
To the removal of difficulties arising cut of anti-christian pride and 
bigotry, calling itself religion. 



A SUMMARY. 



IN THE THIRD ESSAY 



To natural responsibility as attached to the possession of human 
faculties — To rules for self-culture by adults — To arguments in favour 
of the study, for this purpose, of the mental laws by the aid of con- 
sciousness, as peculiarly adapted to the exigencies of those who possess 
neither learning nor books, and who cannot even read — To hints cal- 
culated to assist such persons in observing the movements of their 
own minds, and assuring themselves that they do possess certain 
faculties. 

IN THE SECOND PART OF THE THIRD ESSAY 

To tracing the natural origin of conventional laws and distinctions 
— To showing the necessity of laws to enforce moral order, as indis- 
pensable to the practice of industry — To showing that moral culture 
is necessary to domestic happiness, and to worldly success — To show- 
ing that the natural instinct which desires to respect self, is the sus- 
taining and elevating power of the mind — To showing the grounds 
on which the honest man, however poor and unlearned, is entitled to 
his own respect, and to that of others — To showing the grandem of 
virtue in difficult positions — To showing that ignorance is no longer 
innocent, when leisure and opportunity have brought knowledge 
within the reach of man — To pointing out the new responsibility 
consequent on such privileges. 



END OF FIRST SERIES. 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 



CHAPTER I. 



The light of mental science calculated to facilitate moral training and 
promote our virtue and happiness, as much as the aid of mechanical 
science has improved arts and manufactures, and added to our 
physical comfort. 

God teaches by facts. His practical lessons are the laws 
of nature. That all may benefit by these lessons it becomes 
the duty of every man who is independent of the labour of 
his hands for his daily bread to devote the leisure which such 
a privilege bestows to the study of some of these laws, or 
their application to some useful purpose, mitil every branch 
of human knowledge shall have been reduced to broad com- 
prehensive principles, so simply put that the plainest 
understandings may be able to apply them practically to 
the business of every-day life. 

In many of the physical sciences this is daily being done. 
An individual perceives some law of nature, or the mode of 
adapting such to some useful purpose, and the whole civil- 
ized world immediately partakes of the advantages of the 



2 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

discovery. Why ? Because it is not allowed to remain a 
mere speculation ; it is applied to practice, and thousands 
are instantly and simultaneously employed, bringing within 
the reach of millions, comforts which, prior to such discovery, 
hut the few could command. 

But, alas ! how lamentably little has as yet been achieved 
to improve mind by a like adaptation of the equally fixed laws 
of our inward being to the much more important purposes 
of moral training ! We have hitherto studied the laws of 
mind as matters of speculation only, and limited the sphere 
of such speculations to the closet of the philosopher. 

In consequence of this great error, the most important 
portion of real education is generally completed by accidental, 
and too often unfavourable, circumstances, before parents 
think it time to commence what they intend for education. 

But the laws of our inward being are quite as regular in 
their operation as those of outward nature ; they are 
merely not yet as much attended to, nor as practically 
applied. We have only to trace them with the same care till 
we know them as well, and we shall not only be able to apply 
them with the same certainty, but we shall see clearly that 
it is this adaptation of the laws of our inward being to the 
culture of the religious, moral, and intellectual faculties, 
which should be made the special science of the poor, and 
of little children of all classes ; that it is this science, above 
all others, that should be reduced to practical rules so plain 
that it should need no learning to comprehend them ; that 
it is those rules and their application which should be taught 
to every mother, to every young woman who ever hopes to 
be a mother, to every teacher of youth and trainer of infancy, 
to every governess, nursery-governess, and nursery-maid — 
to all, in short, who are to approach children in any way. 



AN ESSAY ON MOEAL TRAINING. 8 

If it be objected that ignorant servants cannot apply 
lilies of science, it is replied that thousands of ignorant 
manufacturing labourers are constantly employed in adapting 
all the great laws of nature to mechanical operations by 
plain rules deduced, for the purpose, from chemical and 
other sciences ; that every illiterate carpenter's apprentice 
is taught, in like manner, to apply plain rules, drawn from 
the difficult science of geometry, to the forming of angles, 
squares, and circles. 

Now, neither the manufacturing labourer nor the carpen- 
ter's apprentice could have deduced the rules from the 
science ; but they have each been taught to apply the rules, 
when so deduced, to their daily work. Why, then, should 
not nursery maids be taught to apply plain practical rules, 
deduced from mental science, to their daily work — that of 
influencing the associations of the infant mind? 

But philosophers take no cognizance of the existence of 
nursery-maids, and mothers only ask if they can do up small 
linen. Yet, if philosophers have condescended to assist the 
manufacturer and the carpenter, may they not aid the nur- 
sery-maid and the mother ? 

But carpenter's work done by guess could not be tolerated. 
Which, then, are of most importance to society — upright 
door-posts, or upright minds? Which will contribute 
most to domestic happiness — uniform window-frames or 
kindly tempers, ? 

Can, then, moral elevation advance, while (let the strug- 
gles of each adult generation towards progress be what they 
may) the plastic minds of its infants are still handed down 
again to the lowest and most ignorant classes of the com- 
munity to form in their own mould ? 

We should, then, establish institutions in which all who 
b 2 



4 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

are either to teach or to attend upon children should be 
specially trained for the purpose ; that is, shown, by doing 
so in their presence, how to influence the associations of the 
infant mind ; for, let it be remembered, that, though we 
may neglect to guide, we cannot, by any possibility, delay 
the formation of these associations. We may be idle, but 
the great universal teachers — incidental circumstances — are 
always at work. 

Of the portion of early training which belongs to the 
cradle, the first rule is this : — Infant minds must not, by 
neglect, be taught to exhibit, and finally to feel, rage, as 
the natural means of obtaining all they want. 

There is a mysterious instinct which prompts infants, 
long before they can think, to repeat any movement, whether 
mental or bodily, by which they have once obtained their 
ends. A close observance of this natural law, and of nature's 
own proceedings in adapting this law to her purposes, must 
be our guide ; for, during this first period of existence, 
nature is herself, by means of this law, teaching the infant 
how to perform every bodily function which demands the 
intervention of the will. That she is doing so by means of 
this mysterious faculty (which feels, though as it were 
without the cognizance of consciousness, the connection be- 
tween cause and effect) is evident ; for we can clearly trace 
this when the movements are outward — such as in the at 
first ineffectual, but finally successful, efforts of an infant to 
reach a desired object with the hand. When the child tries 
to stand, we see the outward manifestations of its instinctive 
efforts to ascertain how to act by the will on the nerves and 
muscles, in finding its equilibrium; and when it would 
walk, how to preserve that equilibrium on one foot till the 
other is again placed. We can also trace like efforts being 



AN ES3AY ON MORAL TRAINING. 5 

made inwardly to subject the organs of speech to the will; 
and be able to articulate certain sounds at pleasure. 

If then the first murmur of an infant in the cradle be 
neglected, it goes on to cry vehemently, and kick and struggle, 
until such time as the supply of its want arrives. From 
this moment, prompted by this same mysterious instinct 
which is teaching it in everything to seek its ends by the 
means it has once found successful, the kick and the 
vehement ciy are repeated eveiy time a want is felt ; till, 
by the sympathy between the body and the mind, the latter 
leams to give way to rage on the delay for a moment of 
any gratification. For it is a law of our nature that the 
inward faculties are reacted upon, and further excited and 
developed by indidgence in their outward demonstrations ; 
yet the instinctive faculty thus called into premature activity, 
and thus changed by an unnatural combination with the 
helplessness of infancy into impotent anger, is by nature 
but the source of energy given to enable us to struggle 
successfully with the difficulties and dangers of after life ; 
and, under the guidance of the moral and intellectual facul- 
ties, to resist all undue encroachment. An infant that 
appears to be naturally mild is merely wanting in vitality , 
and not likely to live. 

Now when we have thus, by mismanagement, taught an 
infant violence of temper, we say of the poor child it was 
bom naturally passionate. See how it shows its temper in 
the very cradle ! Then people frown at the poor babe, use 
towards it threatening attitudes, and by and by, when they 
think it old enough, beat it perhaps, to correct it, as they 

f imagine, of throwing itself into a rage. By all this they 
only increase the evil a hundred fold, teach the child to 

I imitate the frown, the voice, the attitudes, and to add to 



O AN ESSAY ON MORAL TEAINING. 

hasty violence, lasting resentment, and a thousand other bad 
feelings it should have never known ; and which, if from a 
sense of helplessness it be obliged to hide, it will concentrate 
into hatred of its oppressor, while it will learn, partly by 
imitation and partly by the bad feelings induced by oppres- 
sion, to oppress the more helpless in its turn. Every higher 
faculty, every generous sentiment, will be thus crashed or 
confounded ; benevolence, pity, sympathy, conscience, will be 
all silenced : truth will be sacrificed without compunction to 
escape severity ; self-respect will be utterly lost between 
the vague consciousness of the unworthy feelings thus 
called forth, and the sense of being treated without re- 
spect. At this crisis the intellectual faculties will arouse 
themselves instinctively for self-defence, but, alas ! under 
such circumstances, "will know no higher exercise than to 
contrive how best to baffle the oppressor, and lie, both in 
words and actions, with sufficient cunning not to be found 
out. 

If a mother who has thus mismanaged her child in 
infancy should, as it gets older, attempt to give it lessons in 
religion and morality, having awakened no faculty to which 
to address such lessons, they will be so out of harmony with 
the bad feelings she has raised, that they will seem to the 
child to be words spoken in a foreign tongue, and all things 
connected with them to be cold forms without a soul, dull 
ceremonies to be got over as quickly as possible, and 
forgotten without being applied to conduct — or rather, their 
own conduct ; for there is nothing which strikes the straight- 
forward minds of children more forcibly than incongruity 
between precept and practice in the conduct of others. The 
child "will probably think — " If it be wrong to get into pas- 
sions, why does mamma or w 7 hy does papa speak so loud and 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 7 

look so angry at me, and slap me when I don't know my 
lessons?" 

Look at the devastation here produced — is it not melan- 
choly? 

All the mistakes ever committed by over-indulgence are 
as nothing compared with this. 

Injudicious yielding may and will make children trouble- 
some, create a thousand surface faults of manner and even 
of conduct; but nothing utterly poisons the whole moral 
being at its source, paralyzes the heart, and makes all future 
return to good next to impossible, but the having been 
treated with severity, inconsistency, and injustice during 
infancy and childhood. Yet there are many well-meaning 
parents who sacrifice their own feelings to do all this mischief 
at the supposed call of duty. 

The most important, then, of all the rules of moral training, 
is — Be kind to children ! Judiciously so if you know how to 
be judicious ; but if you do not, at all events be kind ! 
Natural affection, in all doubtful cases, is our safest guide — 
a mother's tenderness the best substitute for knowledge. 

Had it needed learned rules to keep the heart from perish- 
ing, the moral world had long since been a desert ; maternal 
love has been its preserver, while awaiting further light. 
Throughout all the rudest ages of the past, however dense 
the darkness was abroad — however fiercely blew the hur- 
ricane of evil passions from without, on that holy altar the 
sacred flame still burnt ; and thither, when the storm had 
abated, each gentler virtue came once more to have her lamp 
rekindled ! 

But observe, spoiling children by an injudicious indul- 
gence proceeding from fondness, must not be confounded 
with allowing a child to become your master through negli- 



8 AN ESSAY ON MOEAL TBAINING. 

gence, indolence, fear of its temper, or even of the effects 
of its temper on its own health. The child would not com- 
prehend the nice distinction of what you feared : it would 
merely perceive that it ruled by making people afraid of it, 
and, consequently, guided by the instinct which teaches 
children to seek their ends by the same means they have 
once found successful, grow up a tyrant. 

We have left the cradle far behind while discussing what 
should not be done ; let us return thither, and consider what 
should be done. 

First, the wants of the infants must be supplied at the 
very earliest symptom of restlessness, that there may not be 
time for a feeling of impatience to suggest itself. Delay 
camiot teach patience till the child is old enough to be made 
to understand that there is a virtue in waiting patiently 
when delay is necessary. 

Next, parents must learn a perfect command of then own 
tempers : this is indispensable. 

Then none but persons first selected of naturally the 
sweetest dispositions, and then specially trained for the 
pm-pose, should be admitted into nurseries or infant school- 
rooms. An infant should never see a frown, or any other 
manifestation of ungentle feeling ; every face that approaches 
it should wear both a kindly and a cheerful expression ; 
every tone of voice it hears should bear the like character- 
istics. Its heart should be awakened as early as possible by 
fond caresses ; its little sufferings should be soothed and 
amused away with all the ingenuity of affection. In short, 
it should be kept as much as possible from having opportu- 
nities to foiin habits of fretfulness, opposition, or any other 
unamiable emotion, while it is yet too young to understand 
the grave look, the calm but steady demand of obedience, 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRATNTNG. 9 

the kind though irrevocable refusal of improper requests, 
hereafter to be described more at length 






CHAPTER II. 

Practical methods for calling forth sympathy and awakening benevo- 
lence in youn^ children. 

All persons to be placed about children must be taught to 
awaken their sympathies as early as possible, and from the 
moment they can be made to understand a movement — 
much more a word — to give them habits of kindliness by 
calling their natural faculty of benevolence into exercise as 
constantly as occasions can be found, both in soothing each 
others little afflictions, and in showing kindness and 
obligingness of manner, movement, expression of counte- 
nance, and tone of voice to every creature ; for, as already 
observed, it is a law of our nature that the roots of all the 
faculties sympathise inwardly with their outward manifesta- 
tions, which seconds their moral training by assisting 
mechanically their habitual activity and physical develop- 
ment. 

Kindliness of manner, therefore, is not to be considered 
as merely a grace ; its practice in domestic life is virtue in 
constant action ; for it contributes largely to the happiness 
of those around us, while it is further important as a means 
of culture to the. inward virtue it represents — namely, bene- 
volence. Now its sphere is wider still ; for it excites the 
gentler sympathies^of all with whom we come in contact, 



10 AN ESSAY ON MOKAL TRAINING. 

causing the seeds of good feeling to germinate in many a 
breast in which they had else lain dormant ; for benevolence 
is the sun of the moral system, and kindly manners are its 
emanating rays. 

It is possible that the imitation of benevolence in manner, 
which good breeding demands from the higher classes of 
society, imperfect though it be, has had more to do than 
precept with the marked difference between them and the 
lowest classes with respect to crimes of violence and cruelty. 
For there are few in any class left in such total ignorance 
as never to have been told, as far as precept goes, that such 
crimes are wrong. It is, indeed, one of the most precious 
facts brought to light by the application of mental science to 
moral training, that, if we effectually cultivate a virtue, we 
have no need to suppress the opposite vice ; whereas if we 
follow the contraiy — which is the usual system — and attempt 
suppression of the vices without cultivation, except by pre- 
cept, of the virtues, our labour will be in vain, and the 
heads of the hydra will be called again into being by tempta- 
tion as fast as our coercive measures can move them. 
With children the only safe method of checking violent and 
contentious feelings is to excite benevolence. If you slap 
or scold a child who has given a blow to another child, you 
but increase the bad feelings of both. You should seem to 
forget the offender in your eagerness to succour and com- 
fort the injured party. You should occupy yourself in 
soothing and caressing the child who has received the blow 
until the sympathy of the culprit is excited, and it begins to 
follow your example, which even infants in arms will do — 
sometimes without, sometimes with, a little prompting. It 
is quite pretty to see them, when their good feelings are 
thus awakened, gently stroking down and kissing the very 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 11 

cheek to which they had, a moment before, given a rude 
blow. Infants at the same age can, in like manner, be 
induced to put portions of the cake they are eating into the 
mouths of the children around them, and to lend the toy 
they are playing with for a moment. In this lesson, 
however, care must be taken not to stretch the patience of 
a child too far, lest you teach it the next time to be more 
unwilling to part with what it has found difficult to recover. 

Persons training infants should never forget that the 
mysterious instinct so often referred to as feeling the connec- 
tion between cause and effect, and prompting us to seek the 
same ends by the same means, is always on the alert in 
children. Nature, as we have seen from the first, employs 
this instinct as her constant teacher. 

We must follow her example, and in all cases like this 
take care that the pang of privation does not last longer 
than the glow of benevolence, and leave a balance of expe- 
rience against generosity. 



CHAPTER III. 

No such principle in human nature as selfishness. 

Now it is the neglect of this practical training of bene- 
volence which produces the conduct commonly called 
selfishness ; for, much and long as the philosophers have 
disputed about the selfish principle, the light of mental 
science applied to moral training will show that it has no 
existence in human nature ; or, in other words, that there 



12 AN ESSAY ON MOEAL TKAINING. 

is no faculty in the human mind the sole function of which 
is to love self. Selfish conduct is the result of the sympathies 
that should draw us out of self being left unexcited, and of 
the moral and intellectual faculties generally being unen- 
lightened, aud every propensity being thus left to rule in 
turn — often quite as much to the injury of the individual 
himself as to that of his fellow-beings. 

Now every one must know better when he hungers, thirsts, 
is sleepy, feels too warm or too cold, than when any other 
person so suffers. And sad would be the confusion, if each 
individual had not the special care of himself in these 
particulars. A man ought to perform the duties necessary 
to self-preservation, or he will not be rble to fulfil his relative 
duties ; but his finding nothing else to take an interest in 
but himself is an abuse of the instinct of self-preservation, 
which is the fault of his early training, not of his nature. 
Instinct takes charge of the body ; it is the business of 
education to develop and lead abroad the mind. 

Benevolence, then, is the faculty whose office it is to 
cherish, to comfort, to assist, to oblige, to delight in giving 
pleasure, to compassionate suffering. But who or what 
shall be the object of these good offices, — -whether ourselves, 
a lap-dog, or our fellow-beings, — depends on circumstances 
quite distinct from the identity of the faculty which performs 
them. 

But benevolence is excited by an intimate knowledge of 
the circumstances and feelings of its object. Now, as we 
have seen, we are necessarily more intimately acquainted 
with our own wants and wishes, pains and pleasures, than with 
those of any other person; therefore benevolence joined 
with caution, and thus forming the instinct of self-preserva- 
tion, is so often legitimately called upon to be occupied about 






AN ESSAY ON MOEAL TRAINING. 18 

ourselves that this circumstance not only gives an appearance 
of, and, if not counterbalanced by a timely exciting of the 
social affections, produces a tendency to self-partiality in 
conduct ; but make us only one-half as well acquainted with 
the feelings, wishes, hopes, and fears of any other person. 
And benevolence begins immediately to occupy herself 
about that person, and often in preference to self. 

The gradations of interest we take in our relatives and 
Mends are always in proportion to the degrees of intimacy 
we have with their circumstances and feelings, unless 
powerfully counteracted by demerit ; and even then how 
painfully strong will sometimes be the attachment produced 
by pitying the very infirmities under which we suffer, if we 
but see that the offender suffers too. 

Studies, also, which lead us to look habitually into the 
minutiae of the circumstances and sufferings of humanity 
generally, are found to induce in these who pursue them 
feelings of universal philanthropy. Persons who have never 
had their attention so directed, and who have been early 
separated from all near ties of family, or who have been 
coldly treated hi childhood, and therefore never had their 
kindly feelings towards others called into action, are, in 
consequence of this confining of the attention to self, dis- 
posed to apparent self-partiality of conduct ; but they, in 
fact, have had no choice. How could they feel for those to 
whose feelings they were strangers ? 

Young children, also, can know little of any ones feelings 
but their own ; and therefore, in general, they appear to 
be selfish, because exclusively occupied about self. But great 
excitability of sympathy has been given them to correct 
this,, by enabling them to enter into the feelings of others 
the moment their sympathies are appealed to ; and the sooner 



14 AN ESSAY ON MOEAL TEA1NING. 

these sympathies are thus addressed, the sooner children 
cease to act selfishly. Those who continue to act selfishly 
through life, do so because their sympathies had not been 
appealed to till habit had dulled this susceptibility. 

From all this it is clear that the careful culture of sym- 
pathy, and the direction outward from earliest infancy of 
benevolence, by drawing the attention to all the circum- 
stances which are calculated to excite the faculty, will 
effectually prevent the character being in after life what is 
commonly called selfish. 

We all desire by nature to love out of ourselves. A 
solitary being tries to love a cat, a dog, a bird; nay, like 
the well-known instance of the poor prisoner, even a spider. 
In short, anything but self. 

The confining then of benevolence within ourselves, the 
striving to be occupied solely with ourselves, the endeavour 
to make self-love a substitute for social affection, is evidently 
a forced and unnatural position of the mind. The persons 
whom a neglected education and unfavourable circumstances 
have placed in such a mental position, are notoriously 
uncomfortable and unhappy ; they find self an importunate 
and thankless taskmaster; they endeavour in vain to find 
happiness by collecting around self every convenience, every 
luxury, eveiy indulgence ; and, still surrounded by comforts, 
they are confessedly discontented. While, on the contrary, 
let them but begin to love any other creature but self, and 
instantly they become comparatively happy. Even in the 
midst of privation, fatigue, and anxiety, attending the bed- 
side of the sick, — even in circumstances so limited as to be 
obliged to deprive ourselves of necessaries to procure com- 
forts for those we love, — we are yet less wretched than the 
being who has no object to interest him hut himself. While 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. J 5 

it is universally allowed that those whose kindly affections 
are in exercise under fortunate circumstances, and who feel 
that they are contributing to the happiness of those they 
love, enjoy the greatest conceivable degree of earthly felicity. 

That this is a true picture of human nature will not be 
contested; it follows, then, that selfishness is decidedly un- 
natural to the human being. It is but the desperate 
resource of those who are either so stupid or so unfortunate 
as to be unable to find any other ; and it is a resource 
which, as we have seen, fails those who fly to it. 

Now it is a law of our natures that acting in harmony 
with a natural principle yields delight. Selfishness, then, 
cannot be a natural principle ; for we have seen that its 
exercise not only does not yield delight, but that every selfish 
act is proved to be a mistake, by being attended with great 
disappointment and dissatisfaction. Benevolence, on the 
contrary, is a natural principle, for its exercise does yield 
the most exquisite delight. 

Selfish conduct, then, however common, being thus proved 
to be an accident arising out of unfavourable circumstances, 
there is clearly no selfish principle to contend with. The 
unfavourable circumstances must be removed, and favour- 
able ones substituted. 

Let not parents then attempt to excuse their own 
negligence, and throw the blame on their Creator, by talk • 
ing of what they ignorantly call the selfish principle. 
Selfishness is not a principle, but a consequence — the conse- 
quence of the principle of benevolence not having been 
directed outward. 

" The inherent selfishness of human nature" is a fiction. 
The human being is never so happy as when he sends his 
benevolence abroad on her natural mission, that of pitying 



16 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

the sorrows and sympathising in the joys of his fellow- 
beings. 



CHAPTER IV. 

Children may be practically taught that good- will to all necessarily 
includes equal justice. 

Persons being trained to train children, must be taught 
to show them practically, by their own little dealings with 
each other, and by their mother's and teacher's dealings 
with them all, that, on all occasions of doing a kindness, if 
one be pained to please another, the kindness to the one 
is unkindness, which is injustice to the other ; and that, 
therefore, you cannot permit the act, because you love them 
all, and cannot sanction unkindness towards any of them. 
This makes it clear to the apprehension of the merest 
child that the good will which is to all must include justice. 
Such lessons can be illustrated by a thousand practical 
methods, and brought to bear on some little nursery or school- 
room transaction of every day, in which the children them- 
selves are concerned. Instead of permitting nurseiy-maids, 
for instance, to snatch a toy from one child to give it to 
another who desires it, as they often do, especially if the 
child desiring the toy be ailing or be a baby, nursery-maids 
should be taught how to avail themselves of every such 
opportunity for exciting the kindly sympathies of the 
healthier or elder child on behalf of the sufferings or help- 
essness of the other, till the child who has possession of 
the toy is brought to feel more pleasure in yielding than in. 



AN ESSAY ON MOEAL TRAINING. J 7 

keeping the toy ; a result winch it will not be difficult to 
obtain, for it is a law of our nature, that in the young mind 
in which evil habits have not yet been formed, the higher 
faculties, as soon as appealed to, assert their native supre- 
macy ; and that the lower propensities rule the being only 
in the absence, or during the protracted sleep, of their 
lawful masters. 

But the animal instincts are not defects, they are ser- 
vants ; they must be up and stirring — the animal cannot 
exist without them; therefore nature, always the vigilant 
guardian of life, arouses them. The mind must be our 
care ; nor let us imagine that this awaking of the heart 
betimes is a trifle, because it must thus be worked out by 
means of trifles. Every time an emotion of sympathy to- 
wards another being is so thoroughly awakened within the 
breast of a child as to silence a self-regarding propensity, 
that child is a step further removed from turning out a 
selfish character. 






CHAPTER V. 



The mind is not virtuous while virtue is a sacrifice. 

In grown people, indeed, a sense of justice perceived by 
the understanding will sometimes be strong enough, without 
this right training of the affections, to obtain the sacrifice, 
of an unjust inclination ; but when virtue is a sacrifice, 
there is no security, neither is the real object, the inward 
purifying of the heart, obtained. When God said, "Thou 



18 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 



shalt not steal," he judged it necessary to say also, " Thou 
shall not covet."' Sentiments are not commanded so much 
to obtain actions, as actions are commanded to produce 
sentiments. And why? Because those sentiments are 
necessary to prepare our souls for a future, and higher, and 
happier state of being. 

The happiness which virtuous conduct produces in this 
world is but the commencement of its good consequences, 
not the only or the ultimate object of God's moral govern- 
ment. Let us return, then, to the practical training of 
benevolence. As soon as you have excited the sympathy of 
a child, and so inspired it with the wish to do a kind action, 
you must prompt it to seek, and, if necessary, assist it to 
find out, the means of fulfilling its benevolent intentions. 
When these are found, you must prompt it to rejoice 
in this stage of success, and immediately to use the power 
to do good, which, having thus found out the means, it has 
given it. Lay great stress on this acquisition; for it is a 
legitimate source of self-gratulation. What wisdom so 
great as the knowledge of the means of doing good? What 
power so God-like as the power which that knowledge 
bestows? This is simple, and can be practically illustrated 
by numberless of the little daily events of the child's own 
nursery and school-room existence; yet you have thus 
enabled your little child, in its little sphere, to imitate all 
the great attributes of God. His benevolence, when it 
wished to do a kindness ; his wisdom, when it discovered 
the means of doing good ; and his power, when it obtained 
the power of promoting happiness, which a knowledge of 
the means of doing good bestows. 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 3 9 



CHAPTER VI. 

A resolute will in infants denotes energy, not perversity. 

Another accusation, commonly brought against human 
nature, is founded upon the wilfulness of children. "It is 
surprising," people say, "to see how soon the little crea- 
tures get a will of their own." Ignorant nurses and 
nursery-maids are perpetually calling every healthy infant 
hold; because they see it, under the guidance of perseverance, 
sustained by vital energy, striving to subject everything 
to its will. Now, without this instinct of perseverance or 
resolute will, that important instinct already described as 
feeling the connection between cause and effect, and so 
teaching children to stand, to walk, to look, to speak, 
would be useless ; for, without this instinct of perseverance, 
urging the child to repeat its efforts till those efforts are 
crowned with success, when a child's first attempt to walk or 
to speak proved unsuccessful, the child would submit — that 
is, not repeat its attempts, and, consequently, never walk 
nor speak! While, then, a child is practising, under nature's 
tuition, to submit the muscles of its limbs, its eyes, its 
organs of speech, to its acts of volition, how is it to dis- 
tinguish and know that it is not equally lawful for it to 
submit your movements, and those of every one and every 
thing aroimd it to its said acts of volition? Can we expect 
the infant to understand that the sphere of that resolute 
will is confined to the range of its own powers of body and 
of mind? and that again, within this sphere, that will must 



20 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

be subject to the authority of God, represented by that of 
its parents, and to the voice of God, echoed by that of its 
conscience? Why then confound its apprehensions by 
making a vague impression that to will is wrong ? To 
will is not wrong ; though to will in opposition to the above 
considerations is wrong. All this is a late lesson to be 
tenderly taught when it can be comprehended. In the 
meanwhile, all you can do is, with perfect mildness of 
manner, to let the child find out, by its own experience, 
that when you do not approve of its desire, it cannot sub- 
ject your movements to its will; and, if you are firm, it will 
leave off the ineffectual effort, just as it would cease to try 
to move a thing too heavy for its strength; and thus learn, 
on future occasions, not to persist in efforts which, by an 
appeal to your countenance, it sees would be displeasing to 
you and useless to itself. Children, long before they can 
speak, can make and understand such appeals; and it is 
quite amusing to observe them thus economising their 
efforts, and, once thoroughly convinced of their inutility, 
yielding, like little philosophers, to a sense of necessity. 
But until they can begin to understand that there is a 
virtue in submitting to the will of their parents, and that 
you will love them the better for doing so, and withdraw 
your smile of approval if they do not, it is not desirable 
that they should yield too readily to anything which seems 
to them a mere obstacle; on the contrary, the greater their 
perseverance, the more vigorous their efforts — in short, the 
more resolute their will, the greater the energy of charac- 
ter they are likely to possess in after life; and if this 
energy be well directed by early moral training, and not suf- 
fered to degenerate into violence of temper, the greater will 
be the worth and the usefulness of the adult being. Shall 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 21 

we break this resolute will, make the mind of the child in- 
firm of purpose, incapable of future self-government? Or 
shall we cherish the force of the native instincts, and, as 
soon as possible, give them their proper guides by awaking 
sympathy, enlightening veneration, and educating con- 
science? — a process which commences much earlier than 
is generally supposed. For, as we shall see in its proper 
place, to direct veneration aright, or, in other words, to 
show a child what to admire, is to educate conscience ; be- 
cause the desire of our own approbation is the voice of 
conscience ; and in children the desire of approbation is so 
strong an instinct, that to obtain their own and your appro- 
bation, they are irresistibly impelled to imitate what they 
see you admire. Therefore, when you have taught them, by 
this sympathy with your example, what to admire in 
others, you have not only taught them what to approve of in 
themselves, but furnished a motive to action, rooted in the 
natural affections. 



CHAPTER VII. 

The practical training of veneration. 

Veneration, or enthusiastic admiration, is an affection ; 
its training, therefore, must go hand in hand with the first 
awakening of the sympathies, and form the earliest and 
most important portion of moral training. 

The method to be pursued is this. All persons who are 
to be about children must be taught, as soon as a child is 
old enough to be amused by any little tale or fable of any 



22 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

kind, or to comprehend any comment or observation, to 
infuse the spirit of kindness, justice, nobleness, truth, 
unselfishness, magnanimity, and all that constitutes moral 
perfection in its most engaging form, into eveiy story, fable, 
child's play, or nursery or school-room transaction ; in short, 
into everything that is to form whether the amusement, the 
instruction, or the daily occupations of the child ; not by 
grave disquisitions, but by warm appeals to the affections ; 
the lessons rising in importance as the faculties open. 
Without this, all teaching by precept, however just, address- 
ed to the understanding only, will be lost long before the 
child becomes an adult. The affections, alone, never forget. 
Early impressions made on them become part of ourselves. 
They influence opinions which in after life we can trace as 
being formed by our own minds, therefore take to be our 
own. And they are our own, though thus influenced ,' for 
they are derived from affections implanted by nature, 
though awakened, associated, and directed by early moral 
training. 

Education cannot give a faculty; it can but cause the 
seeds that lie within to germinate. But every child not 
bom an idiot is born with the seed of every faculty, though 
varying hr degree. What man can become, by cultivating 
all these, is his nature. 

But as the tendency of the lessons which are to cultivate 
the affections is to the last degree critical, as on such 
tendency will depend the future character of your children, 
it should be those persons who have leisure to study mental 
science, and to form from it the new science of its applica- 
tion to moral training, who should infuse into this important 
process the great principles required, yet give it a form 
simple enough to be successfully applied by all who may be 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 23 

about children, and easily understood by the children 
themselves. It is persons thus fitted for the important 
task who should, in fact, compose the stories, select the 
portions of histoiy, dictate the comments to be made upon 
these, and furnish familiar examples of the kind of illustra- 
tions to be taken from real life, which are the best calculated 
to awaken in children that enthusiastic admiration, re- 
verence, and love of all moral goodness and greatness, 
which, by a law of our nature, infallibly produces the 
effort to assimilate our own mmds to that which we thus 
admire, and which, therefore, renders all lessons against 
unkindness and baseness unnecessary, as such defects cannot 
coexist in the same mind with qualities so opposite. For, 
according to a law of our nature already pointed out, if the 
superior faculties are kept from infancy pressing forward to- 
wards the high standard of perfection, the lower propensities 
will, without any direct suppression, fall into their own places, 
as instruments to be used for their proper purposes, with- 
out danger of being abused. Then it will be seen that God 
gave no bad propensities; and that seeming evil is but 
abused or misdirected good. 

But to render this process for training veneration as 
perfect as possible, it is necessaiy that the writers who 
compose the stories, make the selections, and intersperse 
such with comments, should possess not only the knowledge 
of mental science requisite to enable them to address these 
lessons to the right faculties, but also the special talent to 
do so in a manner that will interest and delight children. 
For dull recitals, however just their moral, will not touch 
sympathy nor awaken enthusiasm; and without touching 
sympathy and awakening enthusiasm, you have done just 
nothing! 

Children have not formed judgments ready with which to 



2 4 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING 

yield a mere cold approval to principles, nor, if they had, 
would such approval influence their conduct, or be remem- 
bered by them in after life ; but children have all the natural 
affections in a state of lively susceptibility, ready to respond 
to every affecting appeal made to them. The affections, 
therefore, of children must be addressed. In short, they 
must, and may, be made passionately in love with virtue, 
and then you will have no need to bid them be virtuous. 

It is not meant to be asserted that children can be made 
in love with philosophical virtue, in the abstract theories of 
the ancient sages ; but they can most assuredly be made in 
love with the virtuous principle in action, infused, in the 
manner described, into the simplest narrations about chil- 
dren of their own age, or about the very sick, or the 
very poor, the very young, or the very old ; and the nobly 
unselfish deeds of those who succour them, or who suffer 
patiently rather than tell a lie, or be guilty of an unkind, 
ness, or commit a dishonest or a dishonourable action; the 
magnanimity of those who so pity him who has done them 
an unkindness, for having the misfortune to be thus wicked, 
that they cannot resent the injury ; or the generous energy 
of those who, having a noble end in view, no fatigue can 
tire, no difficulty deter; the affectionate child, the devoted 
wife, the fond mother, losing self in those they love. In 
short, all that gives faith in the reality of virtue ; all that 
proves selfishness not natural to the human heart. He 
who does not believe in virtue never will be virtuous, while 
all that is not superhuman virtue your child will attain to 
if you teach it to believe in and admire such with enthusiasm ; 
and that you have not broken its energy of will by tyranny, 
nor rendered its conscience callous, and deprived it of all 
hope of gaming your approbation or its own by reproaching 






AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 25 



it with being bold every time it has been thoughtless or 
noisy. 

If an objector should arise who should imagine that to 
awaken this enthusiasm in children would be the difficulty, 
his objection would only prove that he knew nothing of 
children; with their quick, nervous temperaments, ready to 
respond to every slightest touch ; with their sympathies so 
tremblingly alive that they shed tears but because they see 
them, and echo the merry laugh without knowing its cause. 
Nay, a child cannot even pretend to weep in sport, without 
finishing by shedding tears in good earnest, and becoming 
so much affected that you will have some difficulty in 
soothing it. But, what is still more directly to our purpose, 
all who have lived much with children must know that a 
child cannot hear you express approbation of any one 
without longing to do as the person so approved of is 
described to have done. These observations are drawn 
from living examples, and written surrounded by a family 
of ten children, nephews and nieces; and each* day's ex- 
perience but the more fully convinces the writer, that if the 
tales you relate to children, with a view to inspiring vir- 
tuous ambition, be simply and naturally told, and that you 
yourself appear moved — for this is the great secret — there 
will be no bounds to the enthusiasm which you will be able 
to raise in favour of the principle involved in your story, 
however exalted or universal that principle may be. 

It is sophistry, hard-heartedness, worldly-mindedness, arti- 
ficial combinations, for which children find no types within 
their own breasts, which it is difficult to make them under- 
stand sufficiently to feel. It is when you laugh at a child's 
innocent wonder, how some one of whom it has just read or 
heard could have been so unkind or so unjust, and you tell 

c 



2b AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

it that it is the way of the world, that the sparkling eyes of 
the child grow dull, and its little face becomes a disappointed 
blank! 

Observe further, therefore, that while you cannot tell a 
child too many inspiring tales of virtue and magnanimity, 
you must avoid, as far as possible, the common warnings 
against vice in the shape of stories about those who have 
done wrong. You must not make sin, selfishness, and un- 
kindness, appear to be eveiy-day affairs, or you will lower, 
in the mind of your child, the standard of morality, and 
infallibly slacken the efforts of its soul towards assimilation 
with moral greatness. Few adult minds have strength 
enough to resist so fatal an influence. Those of children 
cannot even contend with such. As long as circumstances 
will permit, therefore, let the child know nothing but 
virtue, and that of the most attractive and inspiring order. 
As to its own little faults, treat them as mistakes, the 
result of ignorance and inexperience ; and seem to expect, 
that when you have shown it where the error lay, it will not 
repeat the fault. Prepare it thus for the time when the 
evil that exists in the world must come to its knowledge — 
when it must be duly and fully prepared not to become the 
dupe of the wicked; that it may then look on all who do 
wrong as greatly and terribly mistaken ; and so far from 
imitating their follies, feel the utmost compassion for them, 
and be ready, with benevolent self-devotion, to consecrate 
its best exertions to the rectifying of all those errors which 
stand between human nature and that felicity which we 
should enjoy did moral order prevail. How different this 
from the reconciliation, amounting to careless fellowship, 
with vice and participation in sin, which intimacy in theory 
with such from childhood too generally induces. 






AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING- 27 



CHAPTER VIII. 



The training of veneration is the education of conscience. 

It is a common error, induced by neglect of mental 
science, to say that conscience is, as Johnson's Dictionary 
explains the word, "the faculty by which we judge of the 
goodness and wickedness of our own actions." But con- 
science is not judgment. Conscience is the faculty which 
congratulates us when we think we have done right, and 
stings us to the quick when we think we have done wrong ; 
because instinctive conscience is the instinctive desire of 
our own approbation, without which we must be wretched. 
This instinct supplies the motive to action, but does not tell 
us how to act. Hence the murders and religious persecutions 
committed at the instigation of mistaken conscience. 

Now, the deductions of judgment from experience, and 
the advice of all the moral faculties, must be brought 
together to show instinctive conscience of what to approve. 
It is when conscience has been thus educated by the united 
powers of every moral and intellectual faculty which God 
has given, that her voice represents the voice of God 
speaking within our hearts. The desire, then, of our own 
approbation being the natural instinct or affection by the 
force of which conscience acts on the will, the enlightening 
or education of conscience, which entitles it to represent 
the voice of God, will be found to grow out of the training 
of veneration just described ; for he who has been habituated 
to admire, with an intensity amounting to veneration, the 
highest order of moral excellence in others, cannot possibly 
c 2 






28 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

approve of unkindness, injustice, or neglect of active bene- 
volence in himself His conscience, then, cannot possible 
make mistakes. His conscience must know when to approve 
and when to condemn. This is self-evident. For instance, 
he who had been thus habituated to love, admire, and 
venerate, with an intensity amounting to worship, the 
attributes of God, and that illustration of those attributes 
addressed by God himself to the veneration of the world in 
the life of the Saviour, devoted to doing good — in other 
words, those attributes revealed in action upon earth, in a 
human form, to facilitate their imitation by human beings — 
could not possible imagine that he was doing such a God 
good service by cherishing any intolerant or uncharitable 
feelings, much less by murdering, burning, and torturing 
his fellow creatures for differing for him in some speculative 
creed. Yet this terrible mistake has been made by the 
unenlightened consciences of men calling themselves Chris- 
tians. They sought, thus, their own approbation, as 
supposed by them to represent that of God. But, by so 
doing, they proved that their thoughts were unconsciously 
striving to worship a false God. 

God is invisible to our outward senses We can only 
know him by perceiving his moral and intellectual perfec- 
tions. These, to us, constitute his identity. Any change 
in the qualities forming our idea of his nature, is, then, a 
change in the identity of the object we are endeavouring to 
worship. Those, therefore, who think they worship a being 
whom they believe to be cruel and revengeful, have changed 
the identity of the object of their supposed worship, and are 
endeavouring to worship the devil, though they still call him 
God ; for the identity of that great Being whose nature 
commands the homage of the soul, cannot consist of letters 
in which human language writes a name I 



AN ESSAY ON MOBAL TRAINING. 29 

But such mistakes are not worship ! 

Qualities not calculated to excite veneration may have 
altars raised to them, but they cannot be ivershipped. 

What, then, is worship ? 

It is this, — God, invisible to our senses, appears to our 
souls through the medium of our faculty of perceiving moral 
and intellectual perfection. This contemplation induces an 
intensity of admiration amounting to worship ; and thus, 
through desire of the approbation of conscience, exciting 
every corresponding faculty with which our own minds are 
gifted, to an activity and development tending to produce 
assimilation. 

Those, then, who really worship, must worship the true 
God ; and cannot worship him in vaim 

But, to create this intensity of veneration, which shall 
thus act on the will through that noble ambition of the soul 
— desire of the approbation of an enlightened conscience, and 
so produce a strong effort at assimilation with moral perfec- 
tion, it will not suffice that children be told what they ought 
themselves to admire ; their sympathies must be acted upon 
by example ; they must hear and see their mothers, in 
particular, and, if possible, every one around them, admiring 
with enthusiasm all moral greatness and goodness. The 
whole moral atmosphere that surrounds them must be im- 
pregnated with like sentiments. This is the grand, the 
infallible secret. Nor would this be so difficult as may be 
imagined, if all who were to be about children were trained 
for the purpose, and, to help their memories and understand- 
ings, provided not only with the selections and stories 
alluded to, but also with the comments they were to make 
on such, printed with the selections and stories. Nursery 
maids take the trouble of learning such wise sayings as, " The 



30 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

cow jumped over the moon," or such tales as, " The bonny 
bunch of blackberries," with, no doubt, the laudable intention 
of amusing the children committed to their charge. Could 
they not as easily, or more easily, learn words with an 
amusing and interesting meaning attached to them ? And 
could they not be taught themselves to understand and 
derive amusement and gratification from the instances of 
kindness, justice, and magnanimity they thus learnt to 
relate ? "We must not forget that the human instruments 
we thus propose employing possess themselves the faculty 
of veneration, which, when thus addressed, would awaken 
genuine enthusiasm for kindness and nobleness in many, 
who would thus learn to enter into the spirit of what 
they taught. In the next generation nearly all who had 
been themselves so trained from infancy in establishments 
for the purpose, certainly would. But even in the mean 
time, aided by the forms alluded to, and superintended by 
intelligent mothers, who had taken the trouble of informing 
themselves on the subject, or in schools by heads of esta- 
blishments, the method attempted to be described would 
provide the desired moral atmosphere to a sufficient degree 
to be of immense advantage to the rising generation. 

Children thus trained would be, in a great measure, 
armed against the wrong sentiments which they might 
accidentally hear fall from strangers. Having been treated 
with kindness and confidence, they would refer to their 
mother, who would tell them that the persons so expressing 
themselves were greatly mistaken and much to be pitied, 
as they could not have been taught what was right when 
they were young. Neglected children, on the contrary, pick 
up whatever a stranger says as the opinion of a grown person 
which they are proud to adopt ; but which, not being in the 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 31 

habit of confiding in their parents, they give them no oppor- 
tunity of correcting. Or, if they be children who have been 
treated with harshness — their questions checked by desiring 
them not to be troublesome, and their excuses silenced by 
telling them they have no business to think, but to do as 
they are ordered, the case will be still worse ; they will but 
long the more for independence, and, as a step towards it, 
adopt in secret ever} 7 stray opinion that does not come in the 
shape of a command to entertain such. 

The mental process is this : The tyrannical manner of 
the parent arouses the faculty given us to resist undue 
encroachment ; and, neither reason nor affection being 
awakened as counterbalances, the mind of the child acquires 
the fatal habit of hating all authority. Such children grow 
up with so pitiable a jealousy of being ruled, that in after 
life they will not listen to the advice of their best friends, 
or even to the voice of their own conscience. 

All this is the result of parents and teachers not thinking 
it necessary to make themselves acquainted with the natu- 
ral laws which govern the human mind ; all of which laws 
we can adapt, with infallible certainty, to the noblest 
purposes, but none of which laws we can change in the 
slightest degree. 

How different the picture when a mother has, by her 
winning caresses, her endearing solicitude, her gentleness, 
steadiness, and reasonableness, known how to win the fond 
affections, and command the involuntary respect of her child 
— how to make her tender love necessary to its happiness. 
Such a mother will find that her child's natural instinct of 
desire of approbation, which in all children is powerful, will 
have blended itself so beautifully with its affections, and 
become so completely identified with its desire for her love, 



32 AN ESSAY ON MOKAL TRAINING. 

that her child will obey her willingly in everything, rather 
than forfeit her smile ; and that if by thoughtlessness, or 
forgetfulness, or some momentarily wayward impulse, it 
should be betrayed into committing a fault, that the with- 
drawal of her smile, the steadily withholding of the smile till 
submission be obtained, the looking sorrowful, or shedding 
tears, should the fault, however trivial in appearance, involve 
a grave principle, will always suffice to obtain obedience 
and repentance, accompanied with all the best feelings 
brought into play. But she must have the resolution not 
to give back the smile she has been obliged to withdraw till 
its return be merited by unqualified submission. A child 
must not have one victory to remember ; or, guided by the 
instinct which teaches it to seek the same ends by the same 
means, it will often renew the struggle. And take especial 
care that you gain your first battle, and for ever after, in all 
cases in which severity is supposed to be necessary, firmness 
will answer the purpose better. The mind has an instinctive 
tendency to recur to the first experience as the rule, and 
look on new results as accidents. Having once, therefore, 
convinced the child, by its own experience, that it is hopeless 
to contend with you, it is not likely again to take the trouble 
of trying, even if it had no better motive. Pronounce your 
determination, then, mildly, and remain inflexible, but 
without so much as frowning, no more than smiling, till 
submission be obtained. This foundation being laid, hasten 
to build upon it, as early as the dawning of each faculty will 
permit, the obedience of affection and of reason ; convincing 
the child, first by tenderness of manner, and gradually by 
simple explanations, illustrated by a thousand little circum- 
stances, that you demand obedience, because you love it too 
fondly to permit it to make itself unhappy by doing wrong. 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. i*3 

A mother may here interest and fix the attention of a child, 
by telling it that God had sent it into the world little and 
weak purposely that it might not be able to do much harm 
to itself or to any one else, before it had acquired experience 
enough to know right from wrong ; and had given it into 
the charge of its parents, who had experience, and did know 
right from wrong, and whom, therefore, he required it to 
obey, because he, too, loved it, and willed it to be happy. 

But while a mother must never suffer her child to gain 
one victory, she must take care, on the other hand, that 
she never commences an unnecessary struggle. She must 
make it a matter of conscience, between herself and her 
God, never, from indolence, inadvertence, whim, or change 
of mind, to cause her helpless child, whom he has commit- 
ted to her hands, one moments useless pain. Your child 
may not live to enjoy a future in this life ; let it enjoy the 
present as much as is consistent with its serious well-being. 
Constant checking is a great error. How many things, 
about which poor children are made to cry bitterly, were no 
faults till made such by having been thoughtlessly forbidden. 
Do not put a stop to play, and check merriment, merely 
because they are troublesome to yourself. Let there be 
seasons for behaving in a quiet and orderly manner, in 
obedience to your deliberate arrangements, for such obe- 
dience and such forbearance are moral lessons ; but when it 
is the season for play, if you do not love your children well 
enough to enjoy the sight of their happiness, send them to 
another room to be happy. 

When you do forbid anything, let it be for some very 

sufficient reason, and then never say, " Don't do that, my. 

dear !" and let the thing be done. If the wrong or the annoy 

ance be not of sufficient importance to render it necessary that 

c 5 




34 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

it should be stopped effectually, take no notice of it, and let 
the child follow its own little devices, uniting innocence with 
happiness, without being entrapped, by your inadvertency 
first, and your indolence or even indulgence afterwards, into 
the sin of disobedience at the moment, as well as, what is 
much worse, the habit of not thinking it necessary to obey. 
For, constant checking loses its effect, so far as obtaining 
obedience, and preserves only its power of worrying the 
child, sourirg its temper, and impressing it with the idea 
that it gets all its pleasures in spite of you, instead of having 
them from you. 

A mother must not only avoid unnecessary struggles, but 
she must take care, when the struggle is necessaiy, that the 
instant the child yields, she rewards it with the entire return 
of her kindness. Let there be no after reproaches, no 
tauntings, no reminding it that it had been bold, no lower- 
ing of its self-respect ; but let it feel the delightful contrast, 
in strong relief, of being restored completely to her appro- 
bation, and to that of its own conscience, which, at this age, 
echoes the decisions of the parent. Mothers ! follow this 
method, and be assured that no other rewards or punishments 
will ever be necessaiy to establish the most perfect authority 
— an authority rooted at once in the affections and in the 
convictions — a holy feeling, which would no more allow your 
children to disobey your wishes hi your absence, or after 
your death, than openly to rebel against your commands to 
your face. 

In a child trained in infancy on the system described in 
the foregoing pages, religious as well as moral education is 
already far advanced. The desire of its mother's approbation 
is become indispensable to its happiness, ready to be 
extended to the desire of that of God. The desire of its 






AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING- 35 

own approbation is quickened within its breast, ready to blend 
with both, and assume the voice and authority of conscience. 
Its love and veneration of its earthly parent have filled its 
soul with enthusiastic admiration and awe of tenderness, 
wisdom, and power, as hitherto represented by the parental 
relation, ready to be exalted into love and veneration of its 
heavenly Father, in whom it will now learn to recognise the 
great source and centre of that love by which it has been 
hitherto cheered, that wisdom by which it has been hitherto 
guided, and that power by which it has been hitherto pro- 
tected. 

How urgent, how inspiring the motives with which such 
views furnish mothers, who have not themselves received 
careful moral training, to undertake self-culture, and become 
worthy of the veneration of their children ! Nor is such an 
effort inspired by such a motive, likely to be unsuccessful. 
Maternal tenderness, that best earthly type of G od's parental 
love for all his creatures, is ever operative in generating 
virtue. 

The mother, though neglected in her own childhood, will 
be, as it were, born again with her infant. New suscepti- 
bility of impression through the medium of her new existence 
as a mother, her new hopes, her new fears, her new affec- 
tions, will at once so sweeten and so facilitate the task of 
self-culture, that, without hypocrisy, she will commence by 
seeming better than she is, and, through the exercise of the 
gentler affections and higher faculties, end by becoming 
better than she was. If to this be added such study of the 
laws that govern the human mind as may enable mothers 
to adapt those laws to the formation of the associations and 
mental habits of their children, the great difficulty which 
now exists in consequence of the neglect or mistaken 



36 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

performance of this portion of education in the last generation 
will be, in a great measure, got over in the next. 

Nor let fathers, who in their boyhood may have been 
taught more prosody than morality, and who, consequently, 
may now feel that they have many faults, fear that there 
would be a blameable hypocrisy in endeavouring to appear 
faultless in the eyes of their children. They ought, no doubt, 
to purify their own hearts, rectify their own tempers, and 
exalt their own natures ; but, until they have done so, it is not 
only permitted them, but it is their sacred duty, sedulously 
to hide their faults from their children, that they may 
reverence them sufficiently to learn virtue at their hands. 
And while they are thus dressing themselves in the robes of 
righteousness to meet the pure eyes of their innocent 
offspring, are they not likely to see all things through a new 
medium, and fall in love with the beauty of holiness (for she 
is beautiful) ? Are not their own consciences likely to become 
more tender ? Is not their own standard of morality likely 
to rise ? Will they not become ashamed and afraid to be 
what, in the eyes of their own children, they dare not 
appear to be ? 

In moral training there is one rule which admits of 
no exception : — Mothers, fathers, teachers, and attendants 
— one and all — must have a perfect command of their own 
tempers. No one will ever do any good with a child who 
either exhibits or excites anger. If a child has been pained 
and insulted, whether by your blows or your reproaches, 
the very preoccupation of its mind, independent of the 
opposition set up by resentment will prevent your les- 
sons taking effect. And, if your reproaches lower it 
too much in its own esteem, (which, if often repeated, 
they undoubtedly will), it becomes hopeless, not only of 



AN ESSAY ON MOEAL TRAINING. 37 

your approbation, but, what is still worse, of its own; 
ceases all attempts to obtain either, and sinks into a spirit- 
less creature, condemned to crawl through life deprived of 
that ambition of the soul to rise to its destined elevation 
which, unconsciously perhaps, but not the less certainly, 
sustains the efforts of all who achieve anything noble. 

The subject of temper is thus frequently recurred to, be. 
cause too many consider the crime of poisoning the peace 
of others by its baneful influence but a venial offence ; yet 
temper, as it infects the adults of the present generation, 
from the neglect of moral training in their childhood, is the 
great moral pestilence of the domestic world — one that 
makes a desolation or a hell of too many a hearth where 
else peace and happiness might dwell. And to those who 
have left father and mother to become all the world to each 
other, who have it in their power, by " trifles light as air, 1 ' 
to sweeten the daily cup of existence for each other, how 
often is temper the Juggernaut before whose chariot wheels 
many a gentle affection, that fain would pardon and still 
cling around the harsh offender, is flung down, and crushed 
into the very dust ! And for what ? To make him who 
does the wrong quite as wretched as his victim. 

Parents, train your children to consider how great a sin 
it is to make others miserable without a cause — out of mere 
ill-humour — meaning no harm, perhaps. 

What! " last you so long, live you so merrily," that you 
need grudge each other the few fair moments you might 
enjoy between the storms of life, its necessities, its sick- 
ness, its deaths ? 

Parents, train your children to respect the rights of others, 
and to recognise among the most sacred of those rights the 
right not to have their feelings wounded — the right to all 



38 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRATNTNG. 

the happiness which, in the relation to which you stand 
towards them, you can give them. 

Parents, teach your children that a tone of voice, an 
expression of countenance, that gives needless pain, is a 
crime; nay, that to withhold the kindly accent or gentle 
smile which would have sent joy to the heart that loves us, is 
a wickedness as great as though the sun in the firmament 
were a moral agent, and should refuse the Almighty's com- 
mand to cheer our hemisphere with its light and heat. 

Are not the smiles of affection the sunshine of the moral 
world ? What right have we to make the heart which can- 
not blossom without them wither ? 

With respect to the rewards and punishments which 
regard the mere book lessons of children, all that need be 
said in an essay on the present subject is, that care must 
be taken that they do not counteract moral training. 

The rule is this : — No child must be made to feel that 
the gain of another can be his loss, or the loss of another 
his gain. Prizes, therefore, must not be offered to relative 
but to positive merit — that is, all who reach a certain pro- 
posed standard should receive a prize without any reference 
to how many others may have fallen short of, or attain to, 
or surpassed the same standard. This duly develops and 
rewards desire of approbation, without exciting any wish to 
keep others down, that we may rise on their ruin. 

The base passions, awakened by competition, have been 
known, in some schools, to induce pupils to steal and secretly 
destroy the testimonials (called journals) by which a rival 
candidate would have been entitled to the prize, for the 
purpose of malting their own secondary testimonials rank 
first. 

The tendency of competition will appear in the fulness 






AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 39 

of its mischievous absurdity, by supposing, for a moment, the 
favour of God offered on the principle of school prizes to 
the holiest member of each congregation. If such were the 
case, no pious clergyman could be expected to preach the 
truth, lest he should shut himself out of heaven by having 
the misfortune to make some of his parishioners better 
Christians than himself. 



CHAPTER IX. 



The training of judgment. 



God has given our children reason ; it is for us to make 
them reasoning beings. This must be done by giving their 
reasoning faculties early habits of activity in the perception 
of truth, and of its application to the regulation of conduct ; 
for, inasmuch as the limbs of the body can be rendered 
dexterous in the movements connected with any calling by 
early and constant practice, so can the powers of the mind. 
So far, therefore, from adopting that great error, of never 
giving reasons to children, always give sl child a reason, and 
take care that it should be a good one And let this be a 
means of self-culture. Be thus obliged to have good reasons 
for everything you do ; and tell the child that you explain 
your reasons for the purpose of showing it how to act 
reasonably when it shall no longer have the benefit of your 
advice. You thus prepare your child to know, by an almost 
personal experience, how to act imder all circumstances, 
however varied their details. For, the great principles that 






40 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

ought to govern conduct are few and simple ; those persons, 
therefore, who have been early habituated to apply these 
principles to a certain number of circumstances, will ulti- 
mately know how, by analogy, to apply them to all possible 
circumstances. Great first principles applied thus to whole 
classes of ideas must necessarily simplify just thinking, as 
much as classification assists every science ; or as reducing 
written signs to twenty-four characters of which all words 
must be made, renders reading easier than assigning a 
character to each word, and thus having thousands of ar- 
bitrary signs to remember. Instead of a rule for every little 
circumstance, amounting to thousands, nay, millions, in a 
life-time, we have a few immutable truths ; with these for 
our moral alphabet, we can spell every combination of 
feelings and reasons out of which we should make a motive. 

While you are thus showing your child how you reasoned, 
and what great moral consideration gave the casting voice 
in each decision of your will, you are teaching it one of the 
most precious of practical moral lessons ; for you are, by the 
sympathy of your example, inciting its moral and intellectual 
faculties to consult each other, and mutually to advise and 
enlighten each other prior, to the will giving its consent to 
the performance of any action. 

You must, however, not only give your child your reasons, 
and explain to it how you arrive at your conclusions, but 
you must also lead and habituate its own mind to form 
reasons. That is, you must prompt and aid it to weigh 
itself the materials offered to the judgment and the affections, 
and to form from these wise, virtuous, and sufficient motives 
to action. You have already, by developing its affections 
and exciting its sympathies in the manner described, inclined 
it to do right ; you must now teach it to reason, and be able 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 41 

to tell itself, by deductions from first principles made by its 
own understanding, why right is right. Thus you will 
gradually enable it to form that amalgamation of feeling 
and reason which constitutes an enlightened conscience or 
completed moral sense, ready on all occasions to act on the 
will with the promptitude of a single impulse, and the united 
force of the whole moral and intellectual being. 

A clever and ingenious mother might make mental pro . 
cesses of this kind, despite the seriousness of their import, 
interesting and amusing in the highest degree to a lively 
child, or group of children, by turning her illustrations into 
allegories and personifying the mental powers — representing 
the will as a sovereign taking advice from his ministers, the 
moral and intellectual faculties, especially his prime minister 
conscience ; speaking of the sovereign as a good or a bad 
character according as he followed or neglected the advice of 
his said prime minister ; and again, speaking of the prime 
minister himself as able and enlightened, or the contrary, 
according as he was well informed and well advised by the 
perceiving, the comparing, and the moral faculties, and thus 
capable of giving the best advice to his sovereign, the will, 
on every emergency, without mistake or loss of time. She 
might give spirit to all this, and render it doubly amusing 
to children by describing her personages with countenances, 
voices, and manners characteristic of their natures, and 
making speeches for them also in character. This would 
afford opportunities of representing the propensities in a 
diverting manner, as a very inferior and selfish set of per- 
sons, apt to make troublesome requests and present too 
frequent petitions ; while the will, on all such occasions, 
must be represented as pausing wisely to consult his minis- 
ters, and discussing with them the propriety or impropriety 
of granting such requests. 



42 AN ESSAY ON MOEAL TRAINING. 

The senses of seeing, hearing, &c, might be brought 
forward as witnesses to give their testimony to the facts of 
each case. This would furnish occasions for showing the 
beauty and value of veracity, and the evil tendency and 
despicable nature of falseness. 

This introduction of allegorical personages may be made 
so very droll or so very affecting, as occasion requires, by 
the marked changes alluded to in the tone of voice, expres- 
sion of countenance, &c, and by lively repartees or tender 
appeals to feeling between the characters of the drama, 
that it will be found quite possible to introduce thus, with- 
out the least danger of tediousness to children, an indispen- 
sable exercise of the understanding, for which few grown 
people, from want of right mental habits, have patience — 
namely, chains of reasoning, showing how each effect 
becomes a new cause, till an inevitable conclusion -be ar- 
rived at. 

Whenever it is possible, the children should be prompted 
and assisted by leading questions to go through the series 
and come to the conclusion themselves ; and, should that 
conclusion be calculated to excite a hearty laugh or call 
forth a tear of sympathy, it need not be the less philosophi- 
cally true, and may be the better relished by our little 
party. 

Here the mother should make a matter of great importance 
of each proved conclusion ; treat each such, when arrived at, 
as an acquisition, a piece of mental property ; cause it to 
be written, at the moment, into a book kept for the purpose ; 
and take great care to refer to it, on the next occasion, as a 
starting-point, saying, " We have proved that already." 
Then call for the book into which it was written, and point 
out and read the reference, and recommence thence your 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 43 

new series; and after this, every time a thus-proved 
truth occurs in the course of your progress, make use of it 
by reference, as mathematicians make use of their already 
proved problems. No matter how trifling the subject of any 
such train of exact reasoning ; what is important is the habit 
in searching for truth, of founding each new step on proved 
facts, and so treading firmly. Until, therefore, this mental 
habit be thoroughly confirmed, the simpler the whole 
apparatus of subject, proofs, and facts, the better, because 
the more likely to fix the attention and interest the feelings 
of children. 

Let the subjects be nursery or play-ground transactions; 
let the language be simple enough ; let the manner be 
pleasant enough, feeling enough, and kind enough ; and 
children, with their straightforward unsophisticated minds, 
will easily be brought to see the hinges on which turn great 
truths respecting which philosophers have quibbled for ages. 
The principle involved in the lesson need not to be the 
less important because the subject be but a toy or an 
apple ; while whole evenings might be thus spent with as 
much delight as advantage. 

To do all this, indeed, parents must themselves put off 
their worldly prejudices, and come to the task with as 
much simplicity and honesty of purpose as little children. 

Many children would listen to such moral dramas with 
even a more lively interest than to merely narrated stories ; 
of which notwithstanding all children are known to be so 
fond that they will ask for the same again and again with- 
out tiring. But the attention in the dramas would be kept, 
if possible, still more on the alert by there being so much 
for their own imaginations to create and their own minds to 
do; while the ultimate decision of the will would be looked 



44 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

forward to, as the denouement of the story, with the most 
breathless anxiety. Children somewhat advanced in moral 
training woidd begin to foresee, and prophesy eagerly, what 
would be the said decision. A judicious pause, to let them 
do so, would here be advantageous ; and, as such decision 
must necessarily contain the principle to be established, so 
should it always be made the hinge on which turns the fate 
of the characters of the story. This would be thus a most 
useful and delightful exercise of the children's own con" 
sciences, and of all their moral and intellectual faculties. 
To obviate anything like tediousness, a toy to handle and 
play with might here be introduced, and called the reasoning 
ladder, with little moveable figures, which are to mount, one 
rung at a time, on certain conditions — namely, that the truth 
written on that rung be proved by a chain of reasoning ; the 
puppet on the ladder, the while each question is pending, 
poising one foot in the air, waiting permission to mount, in 
an attitude that shall set all the little group in a roar of 
laughter ; each rung of the ladder having written upon it a 
moral truth, till, at the top of all, appears that never-to-be- 
severed link between the moral and intellectual worlds — 
the fact that nothing is really reasonable which is not 
moral. 

Diverting illustrations of short-sighted selfishness or 
greediness, with laughable failures, like that of the dog in 
the fable of the larger piece of meat, might be introduced 
here. In short, while we are showing that all unkindness 
and injustice, even in its mildest form of carelessness of 
the interests or of the feelings of others, falls back on self, 
and, though founded on supposed prudential reasoning, is 
in fact false reasoning as well as immorality ; we should, 
to prevent languor occurring for a moment, call to our aid, 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 45 

every kind of amusing auxiliary that is but harmless in 
itself, provided it tend to preserve our little group of future 
moral and mental philosophers from yawning and sighing, 
as forms of embryo classical scholars do, poor things ! for at 
least seven years, over their Latin and Greek grammars. 
Not, indeed, because the combinations of signs and sounds 
they are committing to memory present them with ideas 
too abstruse, but because they do not present them with 
any ideas at all at first. After, indeed, groping in total 
darkness among false quantities for three or four out of the 
seven years, they may arrive, at length, at glimmerings of 
false glory and lax morality ; and, if they have admirable 
perseverance, the favoured few may finally succeed in filling 
their imaginations and their memories with a confusion of 
grossnesses, absurdities, ferocities, and unities ; the posses- 
sion of which hidden treasure, without attempting to draw 
from it any deductions, is indicated by the power of making 
a few classical quotations and understanding a few classical 
allusions. To which foundation of a classical education, if 
their parents can afford them an allowance of four or five 
hundred per annum, they may, at college, add the gentle- 
manly accomplishments of giving champagne breakfasts 
and running in debt. 

Is this a preparation either for domestic or for public 
life? Will this training incline the feelings aright, and 
teach the understanding to confirm their choice ? If not, 
it is not the education suited to a moral and intellectual 
being. That the world under such a system is not much 
worse than it is, only proves the strength and imperishable 
nature of the good instincts which God has given us. 

But to return from our digression ; the delay and inter- 
ruption likely to be caused by mingling laughable incidents 



46 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

and accidents with chains of reasoning in the manner 
described above would be anything but time lost. On the 
contrary, the more of playful suspense there is about each 
question to be decided, provided the thing be well managed, 
the greater the impression the decision will make on young 
children ; and this is the grand point ; they have time 
enough before them if they live. If it took a day, there- 
fore — nay, a week, to arrive thus at one conclusion? would 
not our little laughing group, in a few months, possess a 
greater number of truths, applicable by themselves to their 
own conduct, than many a learned man amasses in a life- 
time, although at every literary meal he may have devoured 
ready-made axioms by the page-full ? But taking cognizance 
of assertions made by others, and arriving at conclusions 
made by ourselves, are two very different operations of the 
mind. The only species of delay then to be dreaded, while 
thus training the judgment of children, is such as would 
permit their interest in the decision of the will to flag. 
This, therefore, must be carefully avoided. 

Let us return to our little group of youthful students. A 
mother, with a very moderate talent for sketching, could 
enliven her lessons, and delight her children, by rough 
drawings, made before them, of the personages of her 
allegories, grouped according to her purpose ; while, 
pointing with her pencil from one figure to another as she 
made the speech each was supposed to deliver, she 
would quickly have her eager spectators running round her 
to peep over each other's shoulders with the most ani- 
mated glee. 

Nor would there be wanting attempts to make drawings 
themselves on the subjects ; attempts which ought to be 
encouraged, as tending to impress the ideas on the memory. 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 47 

Such mental exercises might be infinitely varied, having 
for their subjects, from time to time, birds, beasts, dolls, 
cakes, the flying of kites, the sailing of boats, the obliging 
lending and due returning of toys, and the honourable 
fulfilment of every little promise and engagement respecting 
such ; while at the same time we should take especial 
care to avail ourselves of every circumstance happening to 
and around the children themselves, so as to make as many 
as possible of our lessons resemble more occurrences in their 
own lives, experiences collected by themselves, than specu- 
lative rules ; and yet involve, notwithstanding, all the 
great principles necessary to the conduct of after life ; 
while those principles, thus practically impressed on the 
feelings and affections by this association with real events, 
interesting to, and within the comprehension of, children, 
would become landmarks to the moral perceptions never 
to be removed. 

As children are still more forcibly struck and still longer 
amused by objects which are tangible as well as visible 
than by pictures only, there could be no objection to fur- 
nishing them with toy personages representing the mental 
faculties, on the plan of the Noah's Ark for teaching the 
natural history of animals. 

Thus, by handling and grouping on the table, which 
• served as a stage, those allegorical figures, children would 
acquire the elements of internal natural history, or mental 
philosophy, and become as familiar with the powers with 
which their own minds were furnished, as with the very 
chairs and tables of the rooms they usually occupied ; while 
the relative rank and authority of those powers and how to 
use them in getting at moral truth, being illustrated by the 
moral dramas enacted by the figures, would be impressed 
in a manner not likely to be forgotten. 



48 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

The ancient sages, in some instances, called forth to a 
certain degree the judgment, not indeed of children, but of 
youths, by discussing before them at their suppers learned 
questions. But though this practice had in it some good, 
the system of which it was a part was very imperfect : 
the success, therefore, of the ancient philosophers, in forming 
moral characters, was necessarily very partial. First, 
because their own ideas on many points of morals were, 
generally speaking, very faulty ; secondly, because the pre- 
paratory awakening of the sympathies and developing of 
the gentle and kindly affections in infancy and childhood 
were not thought of, while a contrary training was in many 
instances practised ; thirdly, because veneration, instead of 
being excited to admire, venerate, and worship moral 
grandeur, and thus incite the mind, through desire of its 
own approbation, to assimilation with such, was drawn 
aside by the sympathy of example to the adoration, and 
consequent imitation, of false glory. The results were in 
perfect accordance with the laws of mind, as shall be shown 
more at length in its proper place, with some references to 
history. Indeed, if the history of the world, from its com- 
mencement to the present hour, were studied with this one 
principle for our guide, like the compass on the pathless 
seas, it would enable us to steer our way with certainty. 
Nay, if the secret story of every heart that ever beat could 
be laid before us, this same principle would stand forth but 
the more clearly proved — namely, that false worship, or no 
worship (in other words, a false direction of veneration, or 
its non-development) are severally the causes of every 
variety of false conduct. 

Admire falsely, and you live devoted to the pursuit of a 
fallacy ! Do not admire at all, and you sink to the level of 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 49 

the lower animals, and lead a life devoted to sensual 
appetites ! 

Do you wish your children, then, as far as the commanded 
progress may be intended to be carried in this world, to 
" Be perfect even as your Father who is in heaven is per- 
fect," set up before them the mental image of his moral 
grandeur, and burn on its altar night and day the incense 
of your own enthusiastic veneration. 

If any one should be inclined to say that this is not 
religion, will that person go the step farther and assert 
that hope of gain and fear of pain are religion ? or, if he 
should, will he confess that no gain is so great as the glory 
and the bliss of becoming thus perfected ; no pain so 
terrible as the consciousness of having forfeited or even 
postpone such a destiny ? and there will remain but little 
difference of opinion between us. 

We cannot desire pain, or cease to desire happiness ; 
but we can learn to seek our happiness from worthy sources. 



CHAPTER X. 

Another method for enlivening and facilitating moral and intellectual 
training. 

Although the mother has been principally named, it is 
meant to be understood that in the institutions for teaching 
moral training, instructions in the whole system should be 
given in as practical a form as can be devised, not only to 
mothers themselves and all who hope to be mothers, if they 
will attend and learn, but also, as far as possible, to all who 

D 



50 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

may ever be called upon either to aid or to replace mothers, 
and to all intended for teachers, or assistants, or even sen-ants, 
whether in infant or other schools, or in nurseries; with, 
of course, the aid of the written forms already spoken of; 
for only mothers and teachers of great intelligence and 
much good feeling can be expected to compose the moral 
tales, &c, themselves. 

To this teaching to teach must be added a knowledge of 
physical training, or of the conditions of health. This 
knowledge should be given, not only to those destined to 
have the care of children, but also to all the pupils them- 
selves ; as each individual must, in time, become the 
guardian of his own bodily well-being. Not, indeed, as to the 
cure of disease, but as to the preservation of health ; which, 
being a moral obligation, should be taught as such; it being 
self-evident, that he who injures or neglects his powers, 
whether of body or of mind, cannot fulfil perfectly his 
relative duties. 

Now all duties, fully understood, are relative as well as 
self-regarding, and self-regarding as well as relative. The 
old division, therefore, into " self-regarding duties," &c., 
inferred a great moral fallacy — namely, that any being 
could innocently separate himself from the one great whole 
of which he had been created a part. Occasions will not 
be wanting, when children have made themselves unable for 
their lessons or their duties by some act of infant intemper- 
ance in cake, fruit, &c, to illustrate in a manner they will 
understand, the principle that every wilful limitation of our 
powers of usefulness, every wilful retirement, even tem- 
porary, from the active duties of our station, is a modifica- 
tion or milder form of the sin of suicide. 

One among the very great advantages of applying the 



AN ESSAY ON MOBAL TEAINING. 51 

light of mental science to moral training, is that by this 
light mothers will not only see to what faculty to address 
each lesson, but they will perceive that many feelings which 
they have been in the habit of fancying should be checked 
in children are really but misdirected manifestations of 
some of their highest and most valuable faculties ; and that, 
therefore, while turning the manifestation of the faculty 
into a right channel, the greatest care must be taken to 
encourage and cherish the development and energy of the 
faculty itself. 

The light of mental science shows us, for instance, that to 
desire the approbation of conscience, representing that of God, 
so ardently, and to be so wretched when we cannot approve 
ourselves as to feel compelled to do right, is the real office 
of the very same mental power which, when neglected, 
runs to weed, and degenerates into idle efforts to obtain ap- 
plause from those around us for adventitious or worthless 
distinctions ; and to satisfy the cravings of our own hearts, 
after our own approbation by ignorantly endeavouring to 
take pride to ourselves for such. This contemptible abuse 
of this noble faculty has led even some moral philosophers 
to confound the misdirection of the function with the faculty, 
and speak of desire of approbation as an inferior feeling. 
Yet, consider but for a moment. Is it the manifestation 
of an inferior feeling to desire the approbation of God ? If 
not, it is perfectly clear that as we have not several separate 
faculties with which to desire approbation, that it is the ob. 
ject to which the faculty is directed which is changed, not 
the faculty, when this abuse occurs; and that, therefore, 
whether it be our own approbation, the approbation of God, 
or mere applause generally that we desire ; or, whether it 
be on worthy or unworthy grounds that we expect to be 
d 2 



52 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

approved of, that is still the same instinctive faculty that 
acts in desiring the approbation. 

People talk of desire of approbation being too strong. 
It is worse than folly to say so ! If a man grasp a worth- 
less object instead of a valuable one, is it because his hand 
is too strong ? Do we endeavour to rectify his judgment by 
weakening his arm ? 

Can we think that the desire of approbation can be too 
strong when we recognise in this faculty the natural root 
whence conscience draws its vitality ; and, consequently, 
whence educated conscience, after absorbing into itself the 
deductions of the understanding, and being associated with 
enlightened veneration, benevolence, and all the other moral 
faculties, still holds its power of acting on the will as still 
a natural emotion, though now became a complex emotion. 

Now, it is most important to mothers to understand and 
remember all this ; for when they see clearly that the desire 
of our own approbation, representing that of God, constitutes 
the voice of conscience, and yet that the same natural faculty 
desires approbation or applause generally, they must perceive 
that were it possible with the mistaken view of preventing 
vanity, to harden any being into having no desire of approba- 
tion, that being's conscience would have no voice. So that 
when the deductions of the understanding were formed, 
there would still be no general motive power to act on the 
will. Special cases might awaken special motives ; but 
perceiving a line of conduct to be right or wrong would 
furnish no general motive for following or avoiding such. 
The instinct which makes us wretched when we think we 
do not deserve approbation, or fill us with placid joy when 
we think we do deserve approbation, is the root, the vital 
principle of conscience. Let parents, then, take care not 



AN ESSAY ON MOKAL TBAINING. 53 

to mutilate the minds of their children as though they knew 
better than God with what faculties to furnish a soul. 

The real business of education, then, is to preserve the 
energy and activity of every faculty, while directing each 
habitually to its legitimate object. 

We cannot desire the approbation of God and of our own 
conscience too ardently ; we cannot admire moral perfection 
too intensely. Direct, then, but beware of repressing, the 
faculties which perform these functions ! 

Thus, by the light of mental science, a mother sees that 
when her child seeks applause for childish trifles, or admires 
idle vanities, she must not crush an important mental power 
because in its undirected activity it had gone astray ; that 
she must not starve an important mentar*power because, in 
its untaught eagerness for food, it had been about to swallow 
poison ; but that, on the contrary, she must judge by the 
intensity of the moral appetite, that the faculties which so 
craves is proportionately indispensable to the moral ex- 
istence of the being ; and that, therefore, it is her duty to 
provide the moral instinct with proper nourishment as 
assiduously as she would have provided food had it been the 
body of her child which had hungered. 



CHAPTER XI 



Vanity an abuse of the faculty the legitimate function of which is to 
worship. 

Being vain, however, is not even an abuse of the desire 
of approbation. It is, on the contrary, an abuse of the 
possession of our own approbation. It is approving of our- 



54 AN ESSAY ON MOEAL TRAINING. 

selves on false, or idle, or insufficient grounds, which is an 
abuse of self-esteem. 

Now the light of mental science shows that the mental 
act of esteeming ourselves is performed by the same faculty 
by means of which we are enabled to respect and admire 
goodness of every kind, till, by the intensity of our admiration 
of moral perfection, we arrive at the real worship of God. 

Is this faculty to be crushed ? 

Admiring ourselves more than we deserve, is vanity. 
Admiring God with all the intensity of which the soul is 
capable, is piety. 

Self-esteem, then, is veneration turned inward upon our- 
selves, whether on true or false grounds, instead of being 
turned outward on all that is admirable in our fellow- 
creatures, and heavenward on the moral perfections of the 
Deity. In each of these various directions of the faculty, it 
is clearly the object, not the faculty, which has been 
changed. 

Now, it is quite right that a portion of veneration should 
be turned inward on whatever God has given us of good, or 
just, or noble in our own souls ; and that this self-respect 
should, through the legitimate value we place on our own 
approbation, incite us to the cultivation of all our higher 
faculties, and preserve us from the self-degradation of the 
undue indulgence of any of our lower propensities. Thus 
the mother sees, by the light of mental science, that she 
must not attempt to crush self-esteem because, when ill- 
founded, it is absurd or hurtful, but that she must take care 
that the faculty does not, from her neglect, miss its high 
calling, run to weed, and become idle vanity. And, what is 
of incalculable importance to know and to remember, she 
sees by the same steady light of mental science applied to 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 55 

moral training, that the only possible way to prevent this 
running to weed of self-esteem, is to enlighten veneration 
by directing it to the enthusiastic admiration of all moral 
greatness and goodness, from the attributes of God down- 
wards to every thing noble, kindly, or worthy in the soul 
and conduct of all mankind, ourselves included. 

The veneration which has been so enlightened will 
approve of, esteem, or venerate, whether in ourselves or in 
any other being, only such qualities and such conduct as jare 
worthy of approbation, esteem, or veneration. Such self- 
esteem, then, is only another name for the approbation of 
an educated conscience ; for, as we have already seen, it is 
the enlightening of veneration that educates conscience, by 
grafting on its natural root those experiences of the other 
moral faculties, and those deductions of the understanding, 
which are necessary to the perfecting of the moral sense. 

In short, every fresh ray of light obtained from mental 
science but adds a proof, that when we have been brought 
to venerate all that is great and good, the whole soul is 
educated. We only puzzle ourselves by giving things a 
variety of names. Let us turn our attention inward, let us 
look on at the workings of our own minds, and we shall 
perceive that all its most important operations, all that 
decides what sort of character we are, and what shall be 
the general tenor of our conduct through life, are deter- 
mined by what we thoroughly, and cordially, and enthusias- 
tically admire. 

By this it is not meant to be asserted that our conduct is 
necessarily guided by our speculative opinions ; far from it : 
the actions of very many persons are not at all in harmony 
with their speculative opinions. The admiration amounting 
to veneration here spoken of, is a sentiment, a feeling, an 



56 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

affection, it might almost be said, a passion ; while, beyond 
a doubt, the noble ambition of the soul which it awakens to 
resemble that which we thus admire, has all the fervour of 
passion. It is the germ of fitness for a future and higher 
state of being, given to be cultivated from the cradle of the 
grave, and thence transplanted into eternity. This ambi- 
tion of the soul once awakened will govern the life ; for, 
though people do not always live as they think, nor as they 
speak, nor yet as they write they do, invariably, live as they 
habitually feel ! 

Now we have seen, that the faculty which urges us to 
form our lives on the model we feel to be admirable is the 
desire of our own approbation, representing within us the 
voice of God, and implanted in us for the purpose of exciting 
in us that inward virtue or elevation of our own inclinations 
above temptation which is necessary to purity, and which, 
without loving virtue, we could no more attain to by the 
mere conviction of the understanding, than a bird could fly 
by means of its feet without the aid of its wings. 

We have also seen, that the natural craving for approba- 
tion, by even the most ignorant of how to merit such, is 
evidently the souVs instinct of self-preservation. Nay, that of 
the body, as though it knew, intuitively, the inferiority of 
its office, gives away before this of the soul. A fact which 
the history of mankind indisputably proves. 

At the shrine of even false glory, have not whole armies 
and whole nations been found ready to lay down their lives 
that they might die approving of themselves, and obtain 
for their memories after death the approbation of their 
fellow-men? During the Grecian, the Roman, the Judal, 
all the warlike ages, did not, with scarcely an exception' 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 57 

every boy that was born grow up willing to fling away his 
life for false glory ? And why ? Because the instinct of 
veneration urged him to worship ; and the instinct of desire 
of approbation urged him to resemble what he worshipped ; 
and during infancy and childhood he saw every one around 
him worshipped false glory ; and, therefore, his sympathies 
awakened by example, he learnt to worship false glory with 
the whole enthusiasm of his soul's mistaken ambition. 

Does not this sufficiently prove that, on the broad averages 
of history, the great principle — namely, that what we admire 
we strive to assimilate ourselves to, is sufficiently universal 
to defy the varieties of individual character, and give one 
stamp to a whole age or nation ; and that, therefore, it is but 
fair to conclude, that in all future ages and nations whole 
generations of children may be, on an average, made to grow 
up of the type or class of character which they shall be in 
childhood inspired to admire with enthusiasm. This con- 
clusion seems to amount to a self-evident proposition. 

Among the lower propensities, those most necessary to 
the preservation of the individual and of the species are the 
strongest, and therefore, when misdirected, have done the 
most mischief in their sphere. In like manner, among the 
higher faculties, those which are destined when enlightened 
to elevate the soul of man to its utmost attainable perfection, 
are those which have, while misdirected, most devastated 
the world; doubtless in consequence of the irrepressible 
fire and force with which they have been endowed for the 
ultimate fulfilment of their high mission ! 

And the very reason why false glory, false honour, roman- 
tic chivalry, and even the various fanaticisms of superstition* 
have so easily deceived the soul, seems to be this, — that all 
these mistaken objects were less low than grovelling animal 
d 5 



58 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

appetites; and that the soul, naturally hating degradation, 
has endeavoured to rise on the worship of each in turn ; 
while each, in turn, has produced its race of men each 
living according to the fallacy they worshipped, yet all hav- 
ing more affinity with spiritual nature, showing more signs 
of the soul within them than the mere matter-of-fact animal 
of daily routine, with no ambition above his personal comfort. 
So that even in their abuses, and notwithstanding the wide 
spread mischiefs those abuses have wrought, these soul- 
stirring principles have always had their use ; for, in the 
absence of true enthusiasm and true ambition, man, without 
false enthusiasm and false ambition, must have sunk into a 
state of animal degradation scarcely a step removed from 
the mere beasts of the field. But still, the incongruity of 
each and all of those erroneous ambitions and superstitions 
with the natural roots of the faculties of benevolence, justice, 
and reason, has prevented the souls worship of any of them, 
being satisfying to the instinct implanted within us whereby 
to adore that we may emulate perfection ! 

When, however, we see what heroic sacrifices have been 
made for soul-stiring principles, even when mistaken ones ; 
what wonders have been wrought by enthusiasm, even when 
the grounds of that enthusiasm have been false, surely our 
path is clearly traced out for us. Let it be our endeavour 
to raise enthusiasm on true grounds, by presenting to the 
worship of the soul those principles which are in harmony 
with all the natural laws of her inward being, those soul 
stirring principles, the harmony of which with the soul her- 
self consciousness can look within and trace. Such enthusi- 
asm cannot, like the various false enthusiasms, be extin- 
guished by the breaking in of further light : once arisen, it 



AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 59 

must continue to rule the moral and intellectual day of 
which its rising had been the dawn. 

As, then, enthusiasm and ambition, under some of their 
many Proteus shapes, have always been the strongest 
motive-engines of the human mind, we may fairly conclude 
that they will for ever continue to be such. But the enthu- 
siasm, to be in extinguishable, must be that which the ven- 
eration of moral perfection excites ; the ambition, that of 
the soul to attain to such perfection ! 

An objector may arise and say that such ambition is ill 
suited to the sordid, money-getting propensities of our 
nineteenth century. But he would be mistaken. The 
sordid, money-getting propensities of our nineteenth cen- 
tury, are so many altars raised by instinct to an unknown 
God ! The worshippers of Mammon feel the smothered 
flame within them ; they know not how to be great by moral 
and intellectual grandeur; they fain would be so by the 
only means they understand — accumulated riches. 

In short, from the child that shows its new shoes to 
Alexander weeping for a second world to subdue, it is still 
the immortal soul stirring beneath the weight of ignorance, 
and striving to rise above the mere daily routine of feeding 
the body. 

This exertion of moral ideality, or of the power of form- 
ing to ourselves the idea of perfect goodness and greatness, 
together with that beautifully adjusted link in the mental 
laws between ardent admiration and ultimate assimilation, 
have been thus insisted upon and oft repeated, because they 
involve the great purifying, elevating, and spiritualizing 
principal of our nature, and mark (by the most decided line 
of demarcation) the distinction between the faculties of man 



60 AN ESSAY ON MORAL TRAINING. 

and those of the lower animals,* For the lower animals 
do reason, though in an inferior degree, and do possess cer 
certain instincts of attachment, sometimes in a superior 
idegree ; but they certainly do not possess the power of form 
ng within their own minds the mental image of moral and 
intellectual perfection, and of admiring that image with an 
intensity and enthusiasm which awaken the sympathies of 
the moral sentiments, and elevate the desire of approbation 
out of a mere instinct into the noble ambition of the soul 
to assimilate itself with the mental image thus perceived. 

All inspiration, and all appreciation of the ideal, even in 
the fine arts, is derived from some particle of this sentiment ; 
and no animal but man is capable of feeling any particle of 
inspiration ! 

* Some writers have been so mush at a loss to point out a difference 
which was not of degree, that they have seriously suggested, as the 
distinguishing attribute of our species, man's being " the only laughing 
animal" 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 



CHAPTER I. 

A system of public instruction is necessary to moral order. 

Could we hope to prevail with all parents who are capable 
of training their own children, or who are in circumstances 
to give them trained attendants, to adopt just views of 
moral training, still would our task, inspired by good-will 
to all, fall short of its accomplishment ; for the preponderance 
of the masses is much too great for any improvement 
commenced only on the children of the educated classes to 
penetrate downwards under ages, if ever. Or, even were 
the ultimate and not very distant completion of the scheme 
by such means certain, what could justify us in choosing 
the more tedious process ? What right have we to fling 
away one generation of children, much less, perhaps, many 
successive ones ? 

Society requires a new base. To give it such, every 
young child now in existence, whose parents are unable to 
give it good moral training, should be rescued at once from 



62 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

the corrupting influence of evil training, and placed within 
the sanctuary of the infant school for the greater part of 
each day. 

This cannot he done effectually by any instrument of less 
power and consistency than a system of public instruction 
directed by the concentrated intelligence, and deriving 
vigour from the concentrated authority, of the nation, as 
represented by its parliament ; and permanantly supplied by 
a rate levied, like the poor rate, on property; for, as 
claims of the helpless, want of instruction and want of food 
stand on the same footing. If, on religious and moral 
grounds, the bodies of the less fortunate members of a 
Christian community should not be allowed to starve, neither 
should their minds ; while, as a mere selfish consider- 
ation, property is even more immediately concerned in the 
mental than in the physical destitution of its neighbours. 
Property, in paying a moral training rate, would be assuring 
itself, not only from occasional violence, but from all the ten 
thousand every-day petty depredations of unconscientiousness. 
A national or public system of instruction, then, should 
not only be calculated to diffuse throughout all those ranks 
of the community who know how to desire such blessings, 
the humanizing and elevating influences of early moral 
training, but should, in an especial manner, provide for 
bringing home to the very hearths, and pressing upon the 
acceptance of the poor, the ignorant, and the therefore 
helpless, " without money and without price," an effectual 
supply of those influences ; for, surely, they stand most in 
need of such, who, while they are the least able to pay for 
them, least know how even to wish for them. To grant 
educational aid, therefore, as has been proposed, only to 
those who desire knowledge, and who are able and willing 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 63 

to make some " spontaneous effort " towards its attainment, 
carries on its face the stamp of a wrong principle ; a princi- 
ple both insufficient in power, and injudicious in direction. 
It is leaving to him who cannot stand the broken reed to 
lean upon, and placing the crutch in the strong man's hand. 
It is not only sending the physician to those who are whole, 
but refusing his aid to those who are sick. 

Official reports, as sometimes quoted directly, at other 
times made the data of statistical calculations, by Lord 
Brougham, when, some years ago, he brought the subject 
of the insufficiency and inefficiency of the schools then in 
existence before parliament, show that the class from which 
the worst species of criminals are " from generation to 
generation regularly recruited, consists chiefly of that portion 
of the day-labouring population, who, almost from necessity, 
suffer severe and constant difficulty in obtaining the means 
of subsistence " (these are his lordship's words), " and 
whose children, consequently, are t not only without the 
means of obtaining early moral training in any well-ordered 
school, but are subjected to evil influences in the streets 
from experienced villains, who, in many instances, train 
them purposely to be their future tools. " 

Can one word more be necessary to prove that society 
cannot, by any sophistry, be justified in waiting, with its 
eyes thus open to the frightful consequences, till this thus 
destitute class shall have " quarter pence " to spare to pay 
for their children's schooling, before it interferes to rescue 
those children from becoming the thus permitted criminals 
of the rising generation ; for whom our carpenters are saw- 
ing out wood to make them gibbets, because we will not 
employ them to make them desks and benches ; and our 
masons laying brick to brick to build them gaols, because 



C4 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

we will not employ them to erect them school-houses ? For, 
however false, dangerous, and degrading to human nature 
the doctrines of those who endeavour to make these poor 
creatures believe that, because neglected by society, they 
are not responsible beings ; however true it be that man, 
under all circumstances, is accountable for the use he makes 
of the natural faculties, sympathies, and instincts of his 
human nature ; it is no less true that the portion of society 
which enjoys the light of education and religion has no 
right to make the task of the less fortunate portion so much 
more arduous than it necessarily need to be, first, by suffering 
the evil training of the young by hardened adults, and 
secondly, withholding that training of the moral and in- 
tellectual faculties in infancy and childhood which so greatly 
assists the development of the natural powers of man. 

His lordship follows up his remark, as to the class from 
which criminals are recruited, by saying — 

" The question, then, is reduced to this : How shall we 
so deal with this body, this portion of the people, as to 
prevent their offspring from growing up with vicious and 
improvident habits, and train them to form habits which will 
make profligacy improvidence, and crime foreign to their 
nature ? " He then answers his own question thus : " Plant- 
ing a sufficient number of infant schools for training and 
instructing all the children of those classes of the people will 
at once solve the problem of prevention. " The histoiy of 
infant schools shows that they are calculated to prove (to 
use again his lordship s words) "the most efficacious pre- 
ventative of crimes, " — " that their introduction is one of 
the most important improvements in the civil polity of this 
country that has for centuries been made. " Yet the re- 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 65 

ports alluded to show that, of such schools, there existed at 
that time " not above a third of the demand. ''* 

His lordship then shows, from statistical calculations, 
that, on an average of all England and Wales, not " above 
one in twelve " of those requiring education are receiving 
any, even including all the ordinary or general schools, 
which are not open to pupils until they have attained the 
age, in some, of six, in others seven, others eight, others 
nine, and even ten years ; and also that this ill-timed and 
insufficient average amount of instruction is unequally dis- 
tributed, " being most abundant in places where it is least 
wanted," and " scanty exactly in proportion as the circum- 
stances of the people require that it should be abundant;" 
the average sinking, with the increasing necessity, as low 
as " one in fifteen ; " so that " in the great towns of Eng- 
land there is so considerable a deficiency in the means of 
elementary instruction provided, whether as regards endowed 
schools or schools supported by voluntary contributions 
and private exertions, that, in such places, there are nearly 
one half of the children of the poor, destitute of all means 
of education. " 

Needs there more than these authenticated facts to prove 
that the mixed yet unconnected principles now at work are 
not merely insufficient in power, but that they are also, from 
their want of connection, capricious and blind in operation ; 
and, therefore, require to be replaced, by not only a greater 
amount of power, but by a power consolidated and given 
one great aim, and thus rendered consistent and clear-seeing? 

The reports referred to by his lordship go on to show 



* The number is slightly increased since, hut is still immeasurably 
short of the demand. 



66 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTKUCTION. 

that this deficient amount of education is " defective in 
many essential particulars, " and is also, in general, begun 
to be given much too late ; "for that although the child is 
from the very cradle capable of receiving some portion of 
that sort of training which forms the basis of all education, 
yet that the ordinary schools are not open to children under 
six or seven years old ; so that not only is all this valuable 
time thrown away, but, while good habits which might 
be implanted are not formed, evil ones are fixed which too 
often remain through life." 

Surely this enumeration of facts, drawn from official 
sources, and of deductions made by a mind so able as that 
of his lordship, needs not the aid of additional arguments 
to prove the utter hopelessness of the scattered, casual, un- 
guided principles of part payment by parents, part voluntary 
subscription, part endowment, and part government grant, 
operating to produce for centuries to come, if ever, that re- 
ligious, moral, and intellectual improvement of the whole 
people which a systematic application to all classes of the 
very best education, based on infant training, would as surely 
biing about in all, as education, even imperfect as it has 
hitherto been, has already distinguished the most orderly, 
the most pious, the most reflecting, and the most refined 
classes of the community from the most abandoned and 
degraded class of criminals. 

Will any one assert that there is no material difference 
between these two classes ? 

Then no one who cannot assert this can refuse education 
to the whole people ! No matter at what sacrifice, whether 
of money, of private or party interests, or of unchristian 
animosities among Christian brethren. 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 67 

But are they Christians who delay education on such pre- 
texts, while they contend for power ? 

As Solomon discovered the true mother, so let govern- 
ment test contending sects. Let those be deemed the true 
Christians who, to rescue the children of the present gene- 
ration from perishing before their eyes, while spiritual war- 
fare rages, are the first to yield their own fierce claims to 
rule the consciences of others. 

The fear of checking voluntary subscriptions, need not, 
on the plan proposed, be taken into account. It might be 
a valid objection to giving partial assistance, but can be 
none to supporting a complete system by rate ; as, in such 
case, the voluntary subscription would neither be requisite 
nor desirable. The hitherto voluntary subscriber would 
still pay his just proportion, according to his property, in 
the shape of a rate ; while the selfish man, who had hitherto 
refused to give a subscription, would now be obliged to 
pay his rate. 

This equal distribution of the burden of thus lighting 
and cleansing the whole public mind, is also demanded by the 
principle of justice. The benevolent man, who at present 
pays so much more than his share by voluntary subscrip- 
tion, suffers, notwithstanding, from the remaining darkness 
and corruption of society as much as the selfish man, 
who had refused to pay any portion. The selfish man, 
who refuses to pay any portion, benefits as much by the 
partial lighting and cleansing of the mind of some of his 
poorer neighbours, as the benevolent man, who has paid all 
the cost. Were our streets lighted, paved, and cleansed 
by voluntary subscription, how many of the selfish and un- 
just in spirit should we find, year after year, picking their 
steps across the foulness and darkness of their own door- 



68 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

ways to enjoy the lightsomeness and cleanliness of such 
streets as the subscriptions of their more liberal neighbours 
had cleansed and lit ! 

If it be objected, that it is not just that those who have 
no children should pay a moral training rate, it is replied, 
that social order, conscientious neighbours, and honest 
ervantss concern the comfort of every man. We do not find 
that those persons who refuse to subscribe to the support of 
schools, think themselves, therefore, bound to take all the 
disorderly, dishonest servants into their houses, and deal 
with all the drunken, disorderly, dishonest tradespeople ; 
leaving the sober, orderly, and honest to serve those whose 
voluntary subscriptions had rendered them such. Nor 
do we find that the swindlers, pickpockets, housebreakers, 
highway robbers, and murderers are careful to make the 
non-subscribers to educational establishments their only victim. 

The fear of stopping the payments by decent parents, 
who now make a laudable effort to send their children to 
school, is, in like manner, no objection whatsoever to a sys- 
tem so complete as to be independant of all casual support. 

Were a national system, the whole expense of which was 
defrayed by a rate, once established, those persons who were 
both able and willing to pay something towards the educa- 
tion of their children, would still contribute their just pro- 
portion in the shape of rate : those, on the other hand, who 
were able but not willing to pay for sending their children 
to school, would be obliged to pay the rate, and thus com- 
pelled to do justice at once to their own children and to the 
community ; while those who were quite unable to pay 
either rate or school fee would jet have their children rescued 
from inheriting the ignorance, disorderly tendencies, and 
abject poverty of their parents. 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 69 

If it be argued that this class have clergy to teach them, 
churches to go to, and their Bibles to read, it must be 
remembered that such people as are here alluded to are 
generally to ill dressed to appear in churches ; and also, that 
when religion and morality have not been put into the early 
habits of the child, the adult rarely goes to church to seek 
them ; and, further, that their Bibles, if they had them 
they, in many instances, could not read. 

We do not trust to voluntary subscriptions to supply the 
fund from which we pay the army, the navy, or the salaries 
of public men. We do not leave the nation without a 
ministry, and the city of London without a police force, 
waiting till the beggars become able, and the pickpockets 
willing, to defray their share of expenses; and, from a 
refined sense of duty, come forward of their own accord to do 
so, in the face of privation and self-denial, as is irrationally 
expected that parents in the same class will do to procure 
education for their children. Yet can it be pretended that 
the objects of any of these necessary establishments exceed 
in importance that of securing to a whole people sober, 
orderly, kindly, and honest habits ? 

As to the laudable feeling of independence which some 
value so highly as to dread that even education, given un- 
paid for, might impair it, let it show itself when real 
education, that is, moral training, has called it into being, by 
industrious efforts to rise into the class that are able to pay 
rates, and who, having done so, and paid their rates, may 
witness the lighting up of their children's minds, and of 
the lamps of their native town, with feelings of equal inde- 
pendence. ,This would surely be better than that society 
should wait, in darkness and in guilt, until virtue, know- 
ledge self-respect, and consequent feelings of independence, 



70 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

shall spring up unsown in the bosoms of naked, starving, 
much-tempted, evil-trained paupers. As well might the 
agriculturists, grudging the first cost of seed, have let their 
fields lie fallow, year after year, waiting for one spontaneous 
crop from which to gather in grain to sow them with in future. 

What would have been the result ? Physical fame, equal 
to the moral destitution that exists, and must continue to 
exist, in certain districts, as long as the false principle is 
acted upon of withholding government aid from each parish 
or district till its inhabitants have made some " spontaneous 
effort " to help themselves, and thus shown that sense of 
want of knowledge which their very ignorance hides from 
them. 

Should all private schools, including those now called 
public, fall ultimately into disuse in consequence of the 
carrying out of the plan proposed, the masters and teachers 
of such, if competent, would not be aggrieved ; as the es- 
tablishment of a national system of instruction would cause 
a demand for efficient teachers, which for a length of time 
would greatly exceed the supply. 

The deficiency in the number of teachers is lamentable ; 
and not only is this the case, but very many of the present 
insufficient number are grossly inefficient ; while many 
others fall, more or less, short of the desirable standard. 

How many of these self-constituted guides of youth are 
driven by the very poverty which has kept them ignorant 
to pretend to give to others an education which they have 
never received themselves ! And when the poor are the 
victims of such deception, who is there to stand between 
master and pupil ? who to see that the worth in tuition 
of even the miserable pittance paid by needy parents with 
so much difficulty has been received by their children ? 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 71 

Even among the more independent classes, how many 
parents are bat indifferent judges either of what their children 
have learned, or of what they should learn! so that 
if the teacher be ignorant or indolent, he may escape with 
impunity ; or if he be eminently efficient, he may miss the 
high respect due to his superiority. How many teachers 
also, tolerably competent in point of mere learning, and 
thoroughly well meaning, but themselves the slaves of 
ancient customs and unexamined prejudicies, compel their 
pupils to waste the precious years of youth in painful drudgery 
harshly enforced, and send them forth at last, having 
learned (from their master at least) little or nothing that is 
available through life for any good purpose, moral, intellectual, 
or practical ! How many other teachers again, with 
tempers naturally unsuited to their task, untrained themselves 
in their own childhood, and without judgment or 
conscientiousness to correct their tempers, are, by the igno- 
rance of the public mind on the paramount subject of moral 
training, suffered to tyrannize over their pupils till they 
have destroyed every sympathy of the young heart, and 
rendered the children intrusted to their care for improve- 
ment unamiable, and consequently miserable for life them- 
selves, and sources of misery to their future families ! 

These, however, are but the natural, inevitable results of 
education never having been reduced to a regular science, 
based on a thorough acquaintance with the science of mind. 
Surgeons are expected to understand the anatomy of the 
frames they are to operate upon. Is the texture of the 
mind, then, less delicate to handle than that of the body ? 
Our universities, no doubt, give degrees which may be sup- 
posed to answer to the diplomas of the College of Surgeons. 
But, in the first place, it is not for a knowledge of the 



72 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

anatomy of mind that the degrees most frequently demand- 
ed in tutors are given, but merely for acquaintance with a 
certain number of the separate branches of learning, which 
rather adorn than constitute education. In the next place, 
there is no absolute law to prevent self-constituted teachers 
from operating on the minds of the young without possess- 
ing a degree of any kind. Thus it is that minds are muti- 
lated, and some of children's noblest faculties destroyed, 
merely because the misdirection of those faculties has pro- 
duced unruly symptoms. Without a favourable change in 
this the very foundation of the whole fabric, we cannot 
anticipate better things for the future. Neither can we 
expect that in a world in which the majority of mankind 
have still to struggle for their daily bread, that, even if the 
right principles of education were more generally under- 
stood, the parents of intended teachers would incur tho 
necessary expenditure without some fair prospect, both of 
pecuniary remuneration, and of that consideration in society 
which is even more universally coveted than wealth itself. 
It is thus evident that, without the organized machinery of 
a complete national system, it is next to impossible to 
fulfil all the conditions necessary to render education an 
efficient instrument for the production of moral order and 
consequent happiness. 



CHAPTER II. 

Some details of plan. 



The system, when completed, should be worthy of a great 
nation, and consist of a Model Department, a Minister of 
Public Instruction, Boards of Commissioners, Central and 
Local, with the whole series of Schools, Infant, Primary, 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 73 

Secondary, Finishing, Normal, Agricultural, Industrial, and 
Special ; also Schools of Science and Schools of Art, em- 
bracing every branch of human knowledge, useful, orna- 
mental, and curious in research, and accommodated with the 
necessary libraries, reading-rooms, lecture-rooms, orreries, 
observatories, scientific apparatus, work-shops, gardens, 
farms, &c. &c. The infant schools, with their play-grounds, 
everywhere ; all the other portions of the series recurring 
at convenient distances in proportion as the demand for 
them and the possibility of supplying them with efficient 
teachers should increase. 

The whole course should be thus calculated, in time, to 
carry real education, with every species of research, to the 
utmost discoverable limit, and yet should be open, as a 
matter of right, to all ; while each individual's destination 
would indicate to his or her parents or their representatives, 
when to withdraw such persons from the general course and 
devote them to special callings by attendance on special 
sections, or when to devote them to daily labour by sending 
them forth direct from the primary schools to earn their 
daily bread ; it being to be clearly understood that attend- 
ance for some hours of each day on the agricultural or 
industrial schools, or both, is to constitute the exercise and 
recreation of the pupils of the primary schools, that such 
pupils may thus be fitted for labour of every kind, and 
learn trades without the expense or loss of time of an 
apprenticeship. 

If, however, after this withdrawal, such persons should 
find spare hours or spare days for partial attendance on any 
of the advance schools, the whole course or any part of it 
should continue to be still and always open to all such as 
desire so to attend. The fees for such partial attendance, 

E 



74 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

like the fees for regular attendance, to be always paid out 
of the education rate of the pupils own parish, be the 
school he attends located where it may ; each teacher to 
receive a fixed sum per head for each pupil who attends his 
school. This sum never to vary in amount, whatever be 
the rank or the number of the pupils. Such sums to be 
paid by the local commissioners out of the local rate of the 
parish or union to which the pupil belongs, without refer- 
ence to where the school may be situated which his parents 
wish him to attend. This regulation identifies the pecu- 
niary interest of the rate-salaried teacher with the success 
of his school as effectually as if it were a private establish- 
ment ; while the amount of his income would thus depend, 
not only on his efficiency, but on his discharging his duties 
impartially to all ; the non-attendance of a poor pupil being 
as great a loss to his pocket as the non-attendance of a rich 
one. 

Nor need this power of attending schools out of the 
parish cause any intricacy in the accounts of the local 
boards ; the teachers would merely have to send statements 
of the number of pupils who had attended their schools, 
with their names and addresses, to the local commissioners 
of each parish to which each set of pupils belonged, instead 
of sending in accounts to the parents of each child as in 
private schools ; while each board of local commissioners, 
having only the pupils of their own parish to pay for, could 
easily check the teachers' accounts by reference to the 
parents, and also, on receiving such accounts, know what 
amount of rate to levy. The local boards should give 
tickets to such adults as wish to attend occasionally on the 
schools of their own or any other parish ; and those tickets, 
returned signed and attested, should serve as vouchers, 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTKUCTION. 75 

entitling the teachers of the schools so attended to receive 
payment from the local boards. 

These regulations would be of importance to prevent any 
parish from having a pecuniary inducement to suffer its 
schools to fall into decay ; as it would, by this means, have 
its rate to pay notwithstanding — that is, so much per head 
for every pupil from the parish who attended any rate-sup- 
ported school in any other part of the kingdom. 

In the course of years, the very houses and farms of 
a neighbourhood which did not afford good schools, would be 
in danger of being forsaken, or at least considerably lowered 
in value. But, to defeat every possible device of avarice, it 
might, perhaps, be desirable, that attendance on some 
school, under certain regulations, were made compulsory. 
Then, as parents would naturally prefer having first-rate 
education at their own door, to the trouble and expense of 
moving to another parish to seek it, they would generally 
take care to use every means and influence in their power, 
to render the school nearest to themselves as perfect as pos- 
sible. However, as all persons possessing any property 
would have to pay the rate, whether they sent their own 
children to any school or none, they would, in general, be 
anxious, even from avarice, to send their own children to 
school, that they might reap the benefit of their unavoidable 
expenditure. Nor is it unreasonable to expect, that 
persons of the highest rank would, in time, become alive 
to the advantages of availing themselves of the very 
superior system of education to which they would be 
entitled in right of their rate, instead of paying four hun- 
dred pounds per annum for the expenses of one boy, as is 
not now uncommon. When a few such persons lead 
the way, and the public mind becomes accustomed to 
e 2 



76 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

the idea of possessing a national system of public instruction, 
as a part of the national wealth, people will be in no danger 
of confounding its institutions with the old notions associa- 
ted with charity schools ; and ultimately, therefore, will be 
as little deterred by false pride from sending their children 
to those establishments, as from accepting the protection of 
our armies and navies. 

What an invaluable resource would this prove to innumer- 
able families, who, with limited means think themselves 
obliged, from their connections, to maintain a certain stand- 
ing in society, and who, under the present system, lead a 
life of painful struggle to do so, yet give their children any- 
thing like a tolerable education ! To these, the education 
rate would prove a light burden — a mere subscription to a 
benefit-club, in comparison with its mighty advantages. It 
would be only the very rich, who would pay something more 
than the cost of educating their own families on the present 
system. Thus, it would be the very rich, who, in point of 
fact, would bear the burden of educating the very poor — an 
arrangement which appears to be about the most benevolent 
and the most just, that could well be devised. 

No teacher of any rate-supported school can be permitted 
to take one pupil from whom he is to receive, on any pre- 
text, whether as board, present, price of books, or payment 
for accommodation of any kind, the slightest remuneration, 
either beyond or in lieu of the stated rate fee to be paid him 
by the local commissioners. Either, therefore, all the rate- 
supported schools must be day-schools, or, if it be found 
necessary to have boarding-schools, they must be distinct 
establishments, experience having proved, that even a lawful 
payment for board, when day-scholars and boarders are 
mixed, has the same bad effect as a direct bribe ; the day- 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTEUCTION. 77 

scholars, who are generally the poor, finding themselves so 
neglected for the boarders, who are more profitable to the 
masters, that they cease to attend the school.* 



CHAPTER III. 

Application of foundation funds. 
In consequence of the many such shameful abuses of educa- 
tional foundations which have come to light, it would be 
desirable that, in every parish or union possessing any 
educational endowment, all funds, lauds, buildings, &c, being 
the property of such endowments, should be, by Act of Parlia- 
ment, vested in the local commissioners of education for that 
parish, in trust, towards the whole sum required as educa- 
tional rate ; and the difference only, if any, to be levied on 
the private property of the rate-payers. Thus, the inhabi- 
tants of each parish would be giving an interest in correcting 
the abuses of their local charities, and the few individuals 
having a direct interest in continuing the abuse would be 
compelled to yield to the general feeling ; while persons 
who for years had seen the poor robbed, and thought it no 
business of theirs, would thus be marvellously aroused to a 
perception of justice. 

As to thus taking the property bequeathed by the pious 
for the education of the poor, entirely out of the hands of 
the old trusts, where, in so many instances, it is utterly 
lost, and devoting it to the maintenance of an efficient 
system for the promotion of the original intentions of the 

* Sessional Papers, 106. — Boarders paying thirty and forty guineas 
a-year each, are educated out of charity property of 13,627 acres of land 
while the schools thus munificently endowed, afford education, some to 
two, some to three, some to four, and some not to any free scholars. 



78 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

testators, the justice in spirit is manifest : all objections, 
therefore, to such a proceeding, are absurd. Shall a nation 
look on at such an abuse of a testator's intention to educate 
the poor, as an endowment of nine hundred pounds per 
annum, received and appropriated by an absentee master; 
while the locality which ought to be a school, is a saw-pit, 
and is attended by one pupil only?* 

The letter of the law is indeed a most necessary defence 
against the selfishness of individual interpretations, but 
it should never form a bar to the admission of the spirit of 
benevolence and justice, as recognized by the whole com- 
munity through its representatives in Parliament. 



CHAPTEK IV. 

Model department. 

The model department of public instruction should have 

the minister of public instruction and the central board of 

commissioners at its head. 

It should receive into itself every educational improve- 
ment from eveiy possible source, with the purpose of being 
to national education a living heart, and sending forth again 
the precious streams, so collected, vivified, and perfected, 
to circulate to every extremity of the kingdom. 

It should employ a perpetual commission, the duties of 
which should be, first, to form from all the heterogeneous 
elements of education, a regular science, based on the 
natural laws which govern mind, influence its associations, * 
and determine its habits ; and secondly, to use all research 
and industry in perfecting the said science, and keeping 
the public mind in a state of perpetual progress, both as to 

* Pocklington School. Evidence under Lord Brougham's Bill. 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTEUCTION. , 79 

the subjects to be studied, and as to the most approved 
methods of conveying knowledge. 

It should display to the public one of each of the full 
series of schools always in active operation, and always open 
to the inspection of all who wish to derive practical instruc- 
tion from seeing their machinery at work. It would thus 
perform the functions of a great normal college for the im- 
provement of all teachers from all parts of the kingdom by 
merely permitting them to occupy in succession its galleries 
as visitors. It should, however, further charge itself with 
the entire training of as many teachers as it is possible for 
its normal school or schools to be made to accommodate. 

Upon this point, great exertions will for a time be re- 
quired. For, as upon the infant school depends the general 
efficacy of the old system, the first thing to be done, is to 
find or prepare a sufficient number of well- trained teachers, 
to make it possible to plant infinite schools proportionate to 
the population ; in which the children of all those who are 
obliged to be occupied all day in earning their bread, shall 
be preserved from accidents, and from the evil training of 
bad people, and be in the care of persons, trained for the 
purpose, and instructed in all the methods, already descri- 
bed, * of cultivating the moral faculties, and awakening the 
sympathies, by blending great principles with the daily 
transactions of the children's little existence; and thus, 
making infancy and childhood a rehearsal, with respect to 
motives and feelings, of what after-life ought to be. By in- 
ducing the children to play with each other without quar- 
relling. By checking all violence or bad feeling, not by 
correction, but by instantly awaking the opposite kindly 

* Former Essay on the Light of Mental Science applied to Moral 
Training. 



80 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

sympathy. By habituating all the children to a perpetual 
interchange of good offices, with kindliness and obligingness 
of manners, and sympathy in each other's little troubles or 
little pleasures. By habituating them to be honest and 
just in all their little dealings with each other, down to the 
minutia of the lending and restoring of a pin or a marble. 
By fixing their attention on inspiring acts of goodness, put 
into the simplest tales and fables ; until, in the manner so 
fully described in a former essay, the natural instinct which 
desires our own approbation is rendered an enlightened con- 
science. For the child, whom the relation of a tale respect- 
ing honour and honesty has made so secretly ashamed and 
grieved at having a stolen marble in his pocket, that he is 
impelled to restore it, has rehearsed the principle which, 
when he becomes a man, will render an approving con- 
science necessarv to his comfort. While on the contrary, 
the child who, being subjected to the evil training of the 
streets, receives a shout of applause from his urchin com- 
panions on having successfully robbed an old woman's stand of 
gingerbread or apples, is prepared to grow up a house- 
breaker, and perhaps murderer, and end his days on 
the gallows. 

Numbers in these schools will lessen rather than add to 
the difficulty of training, for the power of sympathy is in- 
creased by the influence of numbers ; it is therefore invari- 
ably found, that a few untrained children, brought in 
among a large school of trained ones, do, unbidden, all that 
they see done by the greater number. 

As soon as some of the children have learnt a few letters 
of the alphabet, or made any other small acquirement 
suited to their years, their being appointed monitors and 
made to teach such to the still younger ones, is not merely 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 81 

a convenient arrangement for the conduct of the school, 
but it constitutes another important portion of moral train- 
ing ; for thus we have in addition to all other social virtues, 
the exalted duty of imparting our knowledge to those more 
ignorant and our aid to those more helpless than ourselves, 
being rehearsed by and practically put into the habits of 
multitudes of little creatures, by means which cannot fail, 
if the natural laws which govern minds be adapted to the 
purpose according to the laws which connect effects with 
their causes. 

Is it to be supposed, that children could go forth form 
years of training like this, juvenile offenders, such as street 
training has multiplied, until it has become matter of diffi- 
cult legislation to know how to deal with them ? 

But the deficiency of efficient teachers is so great, that 
the teaching to train becomes a paramount consideration, 
and must go hand in hand with the training of as many in- 
fants as we can find teachers at all capable of training. It 
is probable, therefore, that it may be found necessary to 
concentrate, for some time, the whole resource of the nation 
on the early steps of the system ; namely, the infant school, 
the schools for preparing teachers, and the institutions for 
the training of mothers, nursery governesses, and nursery 
maids, in the process of infant training, as given at length 
in a former essay. 

No supply of infant schools can do away with the neces- 
sity for those institutions. They are indispensable to the 
classes that do not generally send their children to infant 
schools. Nor is it to be desired, that any young child 
should be separated from its mother, whose mother can re- 
main with it, and can be made fit to train her own child. 
Especially when mothers, in the rank to have the assistance 
e 5 



82 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

of teachers and servants, can be supplied with nursery 
maids, nursery governesses, and finishing governesses, all 
purposely trained for their calling. 

To remedy the deficiency of teachers for the infant schools 
as quickly as possible, the government should, during the 
unavoidable delay of organizing the system of national in- 
struction, authorize a provisional board to take into schools 
for preparing teachers, all persons of moral habits, mild 
tempers, good intellectual powers, and kindly obliging man- 
ners, with a cheerful countenance and pleasing tone of voice, 
who can already read and write fairly, and who are willing 
to become teachers, and carefully instruct them in the 
whole process of infant training, together with a knowledge 
of the conditions of health. 

In thus selecting the persons to be afterwards sent out 
as teachers of infant schools, the qualification of amiability 
of temper must in no one instance be dispensed with. No 
person with a defective temper can possibly do justice to 
children, even with the best intentions. Neither is the 
seemingly trifling consideration of a cheerful kindly expres- 
sion of countenance to be dispensed with. Children imi- 
tate countenance ; and it is one of the laws of sympathy, 
that we cannot contract the brow to frown, without feeling 
inwardly disposed to severity. The child, therefore, who 
frequently imitates a frown, becomes, gradually, of a less 
sweet temper before it has reason enough to combat the 
sympathetic influence. Beside which, the child who sees 
a frequent frown on the face of his teacher is certainly less 
happy ; while happiness is the climate absolutely indispen- 
sable to the health, both mental and physical, of children. 

But, to obtain a choice of teachers, we must offer money 
remuneration, and social consideration, sufficient to draw 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 83 

into this noble service of the state those who are most capa- 
ble of assisting us. The establishment of a system of pub- 
lic instruction would render this much easier. Teachers 
connected with the system would thus become portions of a 
great national establishment, and, like the members of 
other public services, would receive their salaries out of 
money collected by the authority of the state for a great 
public service, namely, the maintenance of moral order. 
The dignity of the office would thus be preserved. And, 
when its importance shall be better appreciated, when it 
shall be fully understood, that the moral trainer of the in- 
fant is preparing the ground in which the members of the 
sacred profession are to sow the seed, that thus the preacher 
to adults and the teachers of infants are labourers in the 
same field, dressers of the same vine, the stubborn stems 
of which the preacher might in vain attempt to bend if the 
teacher have not trained the tender shoots ; then would 
the profession of the moral trainer of youth obtain its true 
position, as second only to the sacred profession. This 
consideration would, probably, render persons of the highest 
rank and proudest prejudices willing to adopt the profes- 
sion of teacher, as connected with the state establishment, 
and thus greatly accelerate the completion of the system, 
by bringing to the aid of the government establishment the 
classes who already possess instruction and refinement ; and 
many of whom have even already studied mental philosophy, 
though only as a speculative science, for their amusement ; 
but who, notwithstanding, could more easily be made to 
perceive the advantages of adapting the natural laws of mind 
to the practical purposes of infant training, than those to 
whom the whole of the subject was altogether new. 

And, as the classes alluded to are those which experience 



84 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

the greatest difficulty in finding suitable positions for their 
sons, the National Establishment of Public Instruction 
would prove an invaluable resource to them. They would 
thus see the younger branches of their families provided 
for by the State, yet entitling themselves to the gratitude 
of their country by real and valuable services ; and, at the 
same time, from the nature of the studies and occupations 
connected with those services, almost necessarily rendered 
amiable and happy themselves. While, as soon as the 
schools of the establishment shall be completed and brought 
into full operation, the action and reaction of the system 
will be such, that the course of education necessary to pre- 
pare young men for these offices will cost their parents only 
the payment of their educational rate. 

It is probable that the prejudice which has hitherto de- 
nied to the instructor of youth his true position in society, 
has its origin partly in this profession not being connected 
with the State. Indeed, if this consideration were not taken 
into account, it would seem difficult to discover why in- 
structing and elevating the minds of our countrymen should 
be thought a less honourable service than the slaying of 
our fellow men of other countries, even in defence of our 
own country, and at the risk of our own lives, A feeling 
of grateful veneration towards those who arm to defend the 
women, children, and old men in the hour of danger, is 
easily understood ; and such being in part the origin of 
arms, persons of the highest tone of feeling ha ye naturally, 
at such emergencies, flocked into the profession, and thus 
strengthened the prepossession in its favour. But now, in 
time of peace and security, when the army is thought of 
only as a means of providing for sons ; when parents and 
young men calculate what interest money invested in a 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 85 

commission will pay — although an army is still necesssary 
as a precautionary defence, the first rank (after the church) 
could not rationally he refused to the profession, the duties 
of which ought to be to mould and elevate the human mind, 
provided that profession were a national establishment ; 
and provided, above all things, that the candidates for ad- 
mission to its offices were required to pass through ordeals 
of preparation, and tests of fitness, calculated not only to 
keep out the ignorant pretender, and all with whom, from 
vulgarity, whether of mind or manner, association would be 
painful, but to be a guarantee, that to have been admitted, 
the candidate must necessarily have been proved to possess 
those qualities, both natural and acquired, which most adorn 
the human being : for to this elevation should the standard 
of fitness be ultimately raised. This it is that would 
entirely change the face of things, as it must be confessed 
that the instructors of youth have not hitherto been denied 
due rank in society entirely from prejudice. Too great a 
majority of self-constituted teachers have been really igno- 
rant, while even the learned minority, who have commanded 
the admiration due to their ability or their industry, have 
yet, generally speaking, been eminent only for some sepa- 
rate branch of learning, comparatively of minor importance. 
The case will be very different when efficiency in moral 
and intellectual training, founded on mental philosophy, 
practically applied to education, becomes the indispen- 
sable requisite ; for then the qualities and acquirements 
thus implied in the trainer of infancy and youth, will be 
such, that the standard of admission to the office of teacher, 
under the State educational establishment, must necessarily 
rise so high, that the mere fact of belonging to such a 



86 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTEUCTION. 

profession -will constitute a moral and intellectual rank 
worthy of real ambition. 

Add to this, that on the appearance of any defect in 
moral conduct or in temper, or any want of conscientious 
diligence, the office is forfeited ; and he may well command 
the veneration of society who has not only passed the ordeal 
of admission, but maintained his high position through a 
series of years. 

Let but a sufficient number of young men of influential 
families, impressed with these enlightened views of the sub- 
ject, come forward together, and take upon them these 
highest of human duties, and all the old, partly prejudices, 
and partly well-founded objections to granting this profes- 
sion the rank to which it ought to entitle itself, would at 
once vanish ; and as the State Education Establishment 
would, in this case, be linked by ties of blood with those 
who give society its tone on matters of conventional 
estimation, it would be likely ever after to maintain its 
position. 

This would not only bring to a focus, bearing upon the 
future improvement of society, all the instruction already 
in the country, but also secure to the rising generation the 
minor, yet not unimportant, advantages of accent, idiom, 
and manner. The circumstance of the whole infant popu- 
lation of the nation being thus submitted at once to such 
refining influences, would work like the spell of the en- 
chanter ; and simultaneously, with the great moral move- 
ment, coarseness of thought and expression, vulgarity of 
tone, ungrammatical language, and clumsiness of manner, 
would all disappear in a single, or at farthest, a second 
generation. Nor are these expectations extravagant ; the 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTKUCTION. 87 

extravagance is in refusing to believe that certain influences, 
which invariably do produce certain results on as many as 
are subjected to them, would not produce similar results on 
all were all subjected to them. 

During the years that the children of the present gene- 
ration remain in the infant schools, every exertion should be 
made by the State Educational Establishment to have a 
sufficient number of primary schools ready for their recep- 
tion; not, indeed, so much for the sake of the further 
instruction in learning, however desirable, as because the 
young children, on quitting their first asylums, would still 
be of too tender an age to be flung on a state of society in 
which so much corruption wonld as yet remain among the 
adults of the old generation, who, in their childhood, had 
possessed no such advantages. It is one thing to assert 
that nothing can be done without infant schools, another 
thing to suppose that they can do everything. 

This second step, also, would be rendered much easier 
by the aid of the already educated classes. By their co- 
operation, in short, we should be enabled both to complete 
the machinery of the system of public education, and also 
to raise the standard of admission as teachers to its highest 
elevation in a much shorter period than would otherwise be 
possible. If, however, the force of prejudice should prove 
unconquerable, and prevent these classes giving us their 
aid, it is not the less the duty of government to proceed, 
though more slowly, no doubt, yet as quickly as they are 
able, with such instruments as they can command. 

In this case, indeed, it may be necessary at first to give 
the charge of infant asylums to many persons who are 
capable of little more than preserving from evil training, 
and putting in practice a few plain rules drawn up for their 



88 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

use by persons at the head of the system, understanding 
the science of mind, and its application to moral training. 
But, ultimately, when the difficulties of establishing the 
system are got over, and there has been time to train one 
generation of teachers from infancy by selecting from all 
the infant schools the best trained pupils, of the sweetest 
tempers, and clearest intellect, and preparing them for 
future teachers by a special course of teaching to train, and 
by passing them through the whole series of schools ; — then 
we shall be enabled, though after a much longer interval, to 
raise the standard of admission to the post of teacher under 
the State Education Establishment to the full height 
already suggested. And then it would be desirable that 
the teacher of every infant school should thus be fitted by 
his acquirements to pass on as teacher through the com- 
plete series of schools, and eligible, both by law and ability, 
to rise to the rank of minister of public instruction. 

Indeed, teachers having been themselves trained in their 
infancy, is a condition of due preparation so important, that 
when the establishment shall be complete, it should never 
be dispensed with. At present we must submit to the neces- 
sity, and meet the urgency of the case, by working with the 
best tools we can find, and such as we can hastily prepare. 
Though we cannot all at once do everything, we can imme- 
diately do something — we can, at least, preserve from street 
training, and in this we have not a moment to lose. Each 
generation of little beings whom we are permitting to grow 
out of that tender age at which they are most susceptible 
of training, we are thus subjecting to sufferings which we 
might, in a great measure, prevent, and robbing of portions 
of happiness which our privileges of light and leisure 
render us accountable to diffuse among them. 



\ 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 89 

It is a solemn consideration, that the training of the 
rising generation may be neglected, but cannot be delayed! 
While we are idle, -those great universal teachers (circum- 
stances) are at work. The greater part of those infants 
whom we are not training for good, they are training for 
evil. Too many, alas ! for the convict ship, the gaol, and 
the gallows. 

Can any of us, then, lay our heads on our pillows with 
an approving conscience, who have allowed the day to pass 
without endeavouring to forward this great object — moral 
training for the whole infant population, as far as any mite 
of influence we may each of us possess can go towards its 
promotion ? 






CHAPTER V. 

Is religion the obstacle ? 



But some have conscientious scruples. Is religion, then, 
the obstacle ? Is that religion which says, " Suffer little 
children to come to me," perverted into a source of delay 
which devotes generation after generation of those children 
to destruction ? 

There is something wrong here, no matter how specious 
the pretext. 

If, then, we be not prepared to declare that we are 
willing to see the moral plague of suffering and crime con- 
tinue to rage for an indefinite period, we must, while the 
points which are found difficult to reconcile are being 



90 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

argued, give, at least, asylums from street training to the 
whole infant population, with the plain, simple, moral train- 
ing already described, which cannot offend any conscience ; 
and followed up by primary schools for the reason of con- 
tinued shelter already assigned, and conducted on the same 
broad and simple principle. 

Whatever more a child's parents and pastor may choose to 
teach it at their leisure, the child cannot, in the meantime, 
be the worse for having been habituated, for some years, to 
be kindly and honest, for the love of God and its neigh- 
bour, and to feel the happier itself for being so. Is not 
this religion — all the religion a child can well understand ? 
Surely this is not separating religion from education ! Until 
some such sanctuary, then, be provided, where "babes," too 
young for the " strong meat " of mysteries, shall be fed 
with the milk of human kindness, teaching them to do as 
they would be done by, and sheltered the while from the 
evil training of hosts of adult thieves and murderers, who 
need them for their tools, what hope is there for humanity ? 
Give the meat to all who will, but the milk to all. 

While the mind of Christendom remains in its present 
disgraceful state of civil warfare, while the ministers of 
peace are buckling on their armour, and drawing their 
swords upon each other,* who is to save the innocents from 
the hand of the destroyer ? 

While the missionaries of the gospel of peace are bring- 
ing " railing accusations against each other," who is to 
bring the heathen and the savage to the knowledge of the 
truth? 

In short, while the shepherd of each flock is too intently 

* See Dr. Chalmers's denunciation of the Church Establishments, 
English and Scotch. 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 91 

occupied in proving that all his Christian brethren are with- 
out the pale of salvation to have an argument or a hand to 
spare to lead the erring and the ignorant within what ought 
to be their peaceful fold, who is there to keep the wolves 
from the sheep ? 

Christians, put up*your swords; "you know not what 
manner of spirit ye are of." 

What drove the inquiring mind of Gibbon without the 
pale ? Not the scoffs of the heathen ; no — it was the mis- 
directed arguments of the two great divisions of the Chris 
tian world. Each exhausted every resourse of rhetoric to 
prove the errors of his brother's creed rather than the truth 
of his own; and Gibbon, thus convinced by each that the 
other was in the wrong, rejected both. 



CHAPTER VI. 



Is expense the obstacle ? 



Is it the expenditure that we dread ? Shall a nation calling 
itself great, the colossal fortunes of whose rich sound in the 
ear of the stranger like faiiy tales or " Arabian Nights' 
Entertainments," whose merchants seek the wildest specula- 
tions to employ their surplus capital, refuse to purchase with 
that wealth the blessings of moral order ? The pearl is be- 
yond price. Should not a nation sell all she hath to pur- 
chase it ? But are we sure that even in actual expenditure 
we should not ultimately be gainers? Are our prison 



92 AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 

systems, our criminal courts, our penal colonies, all main- 
tained without expense ? Every county town has its gaol. 
No one seems to murmur at the expense. County gentle- 
men meet and vote in a day thirty thousand, forty thousand, 
fifty thousand pounds to build a new gaol. The Peniten- 
tiary Model Prison, on the north side of London, cost 
eighty thousand pounds. In the name of the God of mercy, 
why are we so liberal to punish what we are so grudging to 
prevent ? Let us give real education, based on early moral 
training, as unsparingly as we give the means by which we 
hope to deter from crime, and all this frightful apparatus 
shall become unnecessary. Then shall we, at no very 
distant period, be enabled to convert this magnificent model 
Penitentiary into a great model moral training asylum for 
infants. Nor would this be the only temple, consecrated to 
suffering and guilt, which would change its destination and 
become the sanctuary of all the holy instincts and kindly 
feelings of many a young heart which had else been tram- 
pled down by overwhelming circumstances into the one 
general mass of wretchedness and corruption. 

For, with nations, and with nations of children, as with 
individual children, the only effectual preventive of violent 
and unruly passions, is the culture of their counterbalanc- 
ing influences, the kindly and gentle affections ; the only 
effectual check on selfish conduct, the calling the human 
sympathies habitually out of self ; the only means of lifting 
the being above grovelling desires, the presenting the natu- 
ral faculty of veneration with objects worthy of its worship, 
and calculated to excite its enthusiastic admiration, and 
awaken the natural ambition of the soul to resemble what 
it approves. 

Then, and then only, does the faculty which perceives 



AN ESSAY ON PUBLIC INSTRUCTION. 93 

the connection between causes and their effects, cease to be 
a servant of sin, and become an instrument for the produc- 
tion of good. 

Hitherto, kings, parents, and teachers have directed 
almost all their efforts to the impossible task of disconnect- 
ing effects from their causes, without intervening adequate 
interrupting causes. Thus they have attempted to prevent, 
by commands and threats, the evil effects of which (by 
neglecting to cultivate the moral faculties) they have per- 
mitted the causes ; while they have lost sight of the great 
master fact, that in the necessary connection between cause 
and effect dwells the secret of power. This is nature's oath 
of allegiance to him who knows her laws. The knowledge 
of those laws is the sceptre by which alone intelligence can 
rule. And this knowledge is the power which he who made 
the laws of nature intrusted to man when he gave him intel- 
ligence to perceive those laws, accompanied, however, with 
moral faculties and human sympathies to check the use of 
that power for evil, and to urge its exercise for good. 
When, in short, he made that marvellous apparatus, a 
human soul, which, in its moral faculties, thus contains a 
revelation of the uses for which its intellectual powers were 
given ; and which, by the profession of this light, is ren- 
dered responsible for the use it makes of this power. 

Let society, then, represented by her rulers, have faith in 
this power, wielded by the guidance of this light, and she 
shall "remove mountains" of ignorance, sin, and misery 
which now weigh on her labouring bosom, and " cast them 
into the ocean" of the past. 



AN ESSAY ON NATURAL 
RESPONSIBILITY. 



CHAPTER I. 

Man possesses certain moral and intellectual faculties, 
human instincts, and human sympathies, which are as much 
parts of his own natural mind as his limbs are parts of his 
own natural body. 

These constitute him a responsible being, responsible for 
the use he shall make of such powers. 

Nothing less than the withdrawal of these powers by 
insanity or idiotism can release him from this responsibility. 

Were I addressing only those who had been instructed 
in scriptural revelation, however unlearned they might be, 
I should have no need to tell them that they were respon- 
sible beings. I should only have to point to them the 
agreement between their natural responsibility and the 
commandments and precepts of the Scriptures. But as 
this essay has a further object, namely, to neutralize the 
poisonous doctrine of non-responsibility, which has been 
poured out among the labouring classes by persons calling 



AN ESSAY ON NATUEAL RESPONSIBILITY. 95 

and perhaps thinking themselves their friends, I take a line 
of argument calculated to show that natural responsibility- 
exists, though in a more limited degree, even in the case of 
those who not only are unlearned, but who never have been 
instructed, from without, in religious or moral obligations 
of any kind. And further, that those who have been robbed 
by evil communications of any sense of religious obligation 
they may ever have possessed, are not, therefore, released 
from their natural responsibility. To such persons, I hope 
to make it self-evident, that the very possession of their 
natural powers of mind and human instincts as human be- 
ings, lay upon them a certain share of moral, social, and 
religious obligation, from which they cannot escape, unless 
they can plead the loss of those powers by insanity or 
idiotism. 

All those who have received some cultivation of their 
natural powers, or been given some instruction in religious 
obligation, will, of course, feel, without my breaking the 
chain of these arguments to press the conclusion, that their 
responsibility is increased in exact proportion to every such 
assistance they may have received from without. 

No one can more fully value every such assistance than 
does the friend who now addresses you, especially when 
such assistance be given in the form of early, moral, and 
religious training; nor can any one more ardently desire 
that this blessing should be extended to the children of 
every one of you. The sincerity of these assurances will 
not be doubted by any one who reads the former essays of 
this series — one addressed to parents and one to her 
Majesty's Ministers. 

But no sense, however deep, of the immense importance 
of early moral training can blind any persons who look 



96 AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 






within their own minds, and reflect on its powers, to the 
utter falseness of the dangerous and degrading doctrine 
which attempts to teach, that any want of aid from without 
can release a human being from the responsibility laid upon 
him by the possession of his own human nature. 

We all by the force of a natural instinct desire to respect 
ourselves ; no man, therefore, well be anxious to deny that 
he possesses these natural powers of mind which distin- 
guish him from the brutes, and give him a higher rank in 
creation. But, that this conviction may not merely gratify 
his pride, but be strong enough to influence his conduct, it 
is desirable that every man should commence the study of 
this subject, by practically convincing himself that he does 
possess these faculties. This he can do by appealing to his own 
consciousness ; that is, by turning his attention inward, and 
assuring himself that he feels the impulses moving within 
him. By this process every one who is neither a madman 
nor an idiot will find that he possesses all the faculties about 
to be enumerated in a greater or less degree, but always 
sufficiently to constitute him a responsible being. 

Commence then your self-examination thus. Recall your 
own experience ! Is there any one of you who has never 
willingly, by a natural impulse, done a kindly action or said 
a kindly word, and experienced, on having done so, a feeling 
of satisfaction which disposed him to do the like kindness 
again ? 

I will reply for you. There is not one among you, I will 
venture to say, who has not more or less frequently felt 
and acted upon this kindly impulse, and experienced satis- 
faction in so doing. 

This impulse, then, proceeded from the naturally un 
taught faculty of benevolence ; and the feeling of satisfac- 



AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 97 

tion which you experienced when you obeyed this impulse 
of benevolence was not an accident — it was so ordained by 
the Great Mind which formed your mind. This is quite 
certain, for you know that the feeling did not come to you 
from without. It was God, then, who through the voice of 
your natural conscience was rewarding you for having done 
a kindly action or spoken a kindly word, and thus encou- 
raging you to do the like again. 

You may think that speaking a kind word is not worth 
all this, but you are mistaken ; the kind word sends a sooth- 
ing, pleasing feeling into the heart of a fellow- creature ; 
it is, therefore, worth a reward from God, because it is 
doing his will — it is co-operating with him in making his 
creatures happy. 

And this reward being thus conveyed to you through the 
inward voice of your natural conscience, proves to you be- 
yond a doubt that you have a conscience - -that is, a natural 
instinct which craves for your own approbation. 

This instinct may be more or less enlightened, either by 
the other powers of your own mind or from without ; but it has 
always by nature voice enough to prove the reality of its 
existence. Look within your own minds again ! Not one 
of you can say that you do not feel more or less satisfaction, 
more or less pleased and contented with yourselves, when 
you have done any action which you believe to be good- 
natured, or just, or right in any way ; and, on the other 
hand, that you do not feel, in despite of every effort to drive 
away the thought, more or less uncomfortable, out of hu- 
mour with yourselves, dissatisfied, and degraded, when you 
think you have done an unjust, a cruel, or a mean action. 

This proceeds from the natural instinct above named, 
which makes your own respect and approbation absolutely 

F 



9o AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

necessary to your comfort ; whether or not you know how 
to deserve it, and whether or not you have been taught to 
know that this instinct represents the voice of God. 

Thus, in the most ignorant of breasts there is still an 
altar to its unknown God ; for, the natural longing of the 
human heart to be able to feel self-respect and self-approval 
is not merely a desire, it is the soul's instinct of self- 
preservation — it is an imperative want, winch the soul can 
no more be contented without supplying, than the body 
can rest satisfied without the food necessary to life. Now, 
when you look within among your own thoughts and reflect, 
you can feel that this instinct is as much a part of your 
own natural minds as your limbs are parts of your own 
natural bodies. 

Here is manifest design on the part of the Great Mind 
of the universe. Here is an everlasting motive placed 
within your own breasts, calculated to incline you eternally 
towards virtue and happiness ; for here is the hand of God 
as visible as the sun in the firmament, drawing you towards 
virtue by the instinctive pleasure you feel when you think 
you have done right, and deterring you from wickedness by 
the instinctive pain you feel when you think you have done 
wrong. And though conscience, when not assisted by the 
other powers of the mind, sometimes makes mistakes, this 
is not from any defect in that precious instinct. It does its 
office when it makes you desire your own approbation. It 
is the office of benevolence, and of the sympathies, and the 
understanding, to show you what to do, and what to avoid 
doing, to deserve that approbation. For, inasmuch as it 
requires the aid [of various outward senses to test the 
nature of a physical object — the sight to distinguish its 
oolours — the feeling its texture — the smell its odour — the 



AN ESSAY ON NATUKAL EESPONSIBILITY. 99 

taste its flavour — so does it require the concurrence of 
various mental powers to test the moral qualities of actions. 
Benevolence, as I have already pointed out, shows you, by 
the instinctive pleasure you feel in seeing pleasure, and by 
the instinctive pain you feel in seeing pain, that causing 
happiness is right, and that causing suffering is wrong; 
your human sympathies explain to you that others feel as 
you do. Your understanding — that is, the mental power 
which naturally, without any teaching, sees the connection 
between causes and their effects — shows you not only how 
to cause happiness, and how to avoid causing pain, but, by 
enabling you to trace probable consequences beforehand, 
prevents your being deceived by what may seem for the 
moment pleasure to yourselves or others, but which is cal- 
culated to draw after it a train of evil consequences, as all 
departures from moral order, however trifling they may 
appear at first, you find upon reflection are likely to do. 
Now each one of you having these moral instincts and 
powers of perception, of memory, and of reflection in your 
own natural minds, you are able, and therefore responsible 
to use them; and by their use to come to this rational 
conclusion, whether you have been taught the letters of 
the alphabet or not. 

Much easier, no doubt, is the task of those who, having 
been instructed in scriptural revelation, have all these 
moral conclusions made for them and given to them in 
explicit commandments from God. Such persons also 
being thus taught that the disapprobation of their own con- 
science represents that of God, the voice of their conscience 
has greater authority. But my immediate object, as I have 
stated in the commencement of this essay, is to prove to 
those who are without this or any other assistance from 
f2 



100 AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

without, that eYen they are still responsible beings, in eon- 
sequence of their possession of the range of faculties -which 
constitute a human mind, and by means of which eve>y 
human being, however unlettered, carries about [with him 
in his own breast a direct revelation of the intentions of 
the Mind which made his mind. 

Examine again jour own thoughts, and you will find 
within you a natural faculty which not only can admire, but 
which cannot help admiring goodness, and kindness, and 
honesty in others, even though you may often, from want 
of early right habits, do wrong yourselves. 

Now observe, that when the mind yields itself to this 
admiration of goodness, the feeling immediately arouses 
the natural instinct I have already described, which craves 
for your own approbation as naturally as a hungry man 
craves for food ; and thus urges you to strive to imitate this 
goodness which has inspired you with admiration. You do 
not always, it is true, obey this impulse (for if you did you 
would soon be perfect beings), but you are not quite satisfied 
with yourselves while you resist the impulse. Here then, 
you see in the natural faculty which admires, in the natural 
faculty which so craves for your own approbation as to urge 
you to strive to imitate what you admire, or be dissatisfied 
with yourself till 3-ou do so manifest a^design on the part of 
the Great Mind of the universe to draw you towards virtue 
of a still more exalted nature than the mere avoidance of 
great crimes. 

Here again it must be admitted, that the task is rendered 
infinitely easier to those who are assisted by the practical 
revelation addressed to the veneration of the Christian 
world in the life of the Saviour, devoted to instructing the 
ignorant, healing the sick, soothing the afflicted, and doing 



AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 101 

good in every way ; and thus displaying the attributes of a 
good and merciful God made visible in action upon earth, 
and clothed in a human form to render their imitation by 
human beings more possible. 

Yet those who have not this assistance are not, therefore, 
released from their responsibility, for they still have their 
natural conscience. 

This it is that makes the eye of the guilty man fear to 
meet the eye of his fellow-men. This it is that makes the 
features of the guilty man grow hateful from the expression 
they cannot avoid acquiring of conscious degradation, and 
wicked hatred and defiance of those whose happiness he 
knows he is lessening — whose comfort he knows he is dis- 
turbing — whose just resentment he knows he is incurring 
by his invasions of moral order ; for, as I have shown you, 
though he may not know the letters of the alphabet, the 
natural powers of his mind which I have described to you, 
acting upon his experience, have compelled him to see that 
evil consequences to some one have followed on all his evil 
acts ; and his human sympathies, in despite of all his 
efforts to smother them, have compelled him to feel, that, 
by making others suffer what he would not like to suffer 
himself, he has put enmity between himself and them. 
It is in vain for him to plead ignorance ; God has so made 
his soul that he cannot exist surrounded by the commonest 
occurrences of life, and remain in the dark. 

And thus his natural conscience, though no human being 
but himself should know his guilt, has authority sufficient 
to punish him on the spot, by making him discontented, 
restless, and full of vague apprehensions, notwithstanding 
that he has never been taught (by precepts from without) 
to know that this reproving voice of conscience, this constant 



102 AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

looker-on at every passing thought, represents thus within 
the breasts of all the omnipresence of Him who sees the 
heart. 

Wicked men, 'tis true, strive to brave their consciences 
by riotous conduct and loud laughter ; but did any one of 
you ever see the eye of the wicked man dance with real heart- 
felt joy. Did any of you ever see the smile of real peace- 
ful happiness on his lips ? Never. 

Self-respect, on the other hand, being the natural voice 
of an approving conscience — the natural reward of honest 
and kind intentions, no one who has not forfeited his claim 
to the feeling by offending his conscience ought to be with- 
out such self-respect, however unimportant his adventitious 
rank in society may be. 

This self-respect, founded in the first place on the posses- 
sion of your human nature, which marks your rank in 
creation, should rise in proportion as you make a good use 
of those natural powers, Many of you, though poor and 
unlettered, have so used your human instincts and human 
sympathies, that you have acted kindly in all your family 
and neighbourly relations ; and so used your natural under- 
standings, that you have observed the consequences of 
actions — reflected upon these consequences — tested them 
by your moral instincts, and made out for yourselves a 
plain, direct, moral common-sense, which has made you so 
far good judges of straightforward right and wrong, that 
you have seen that injustice always gives some one pain, 
and that lying always robs some one of the use of his judg- 
ment in avoiding pain ; so that, thus enlightened, the 
natural instinct which craves for your own approbation has 
urged you to be honest and just in all your dealings, and 
true in all your words ; because, you could not satisfy this 



AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 103 

your natural conscience, and feel nappy and comfortable 
without being so. Such of you as are thus practising patient 
industry for the support of your families, and resisting the 
sore temptations of poverty for conscience sake, are worthy 
of the very greatest respect, nay, admiration, for there is 
heroism in the virtue of a poor man ; and, in this case, the 
poorer and the more unlettered the man is, the greater the 
respect and veneration due to him, for goodness under such 
difficult circumstances is greatness indeed ! I said unlet- 
tered, not ignorant, for I will not call him ignorant whom 
God himself hath thus wonderfully taught, through his 
natural faculties and instincts acting upon the natural re- 
lations of existence. Yet some of you, because you are poor, 
and destitute of book-learning and curious and ornamental 
instruction, are apt to confound yourselves with your con- 
dition, and lose a portion of your self-respect. But this is 
a mistake to be carefully avoided ; for, it not only deprives 
you of your just reward, but also of a great support of virtue, 
and thus subjects you to fall into degrading vices, and really 
forfeit that self-respect as well as respect from others, to 
which you had else been so eminently entitled under every 
outward circumstance, however unfavourable. 

He who has found out how to be honest and kind 
possesses that wisdom without which all other knowledge 
gives but the power to do evil the more effectually. Seek 
therefore, all of you, first the wisdom which is virtue ; for 
then only will the knowledge which is power (whenever 
you are able to obtain such) become a means of doing good. 

A well-meant zeal for education, and in some perhaps, 
pity for those deprived of its blessings, may have produced 
this erroneous doctrine of the non-responsibility of persons 
thus unfortunately circumstanced. But short-sighted in- 
deed, and insulting to you was the friendship of those who 



104 AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

thought thus degradingly of you, aud who strove so to de- 
grade you in your own opinion, as to believe, and endeavour 
to make you believe, that you had no position hi creation — 
no dignity as human beings, but were the mere creatures 
of outward circumstances ; and that these outward circum- 
stances could reduce you, with all the noble apparatus of 
mind which you possess, to the level of the brutes, and 
bridge over that immeasurable distance — a distance so im- 
mensely greater than that between the mightiest potentate 
and poorest beggar — the distance between the responsible 
human being, furnished with moral and intellectual faculties, 
and human instincts, and human sympathies, and, above 
all, with an insatiable craving for his own respect, and the 
non-responsible brutes, with their animal instincts moving 
them mechanically towards the appetites and operations 
necessary to animal existence, and resting satisfied in these 
as an end. While man, even when unenlightened, or worse, 
when led astray — ever ambitious, be it for a bauble — ever 
enthusiastic, be it for a fallacy — ever ready to sacrifice the 
interests or the life of the body to the ambitious struggles 
of the soul — ever longing for his own good opinion and 
that of others to raise him in his own estimation, evidences 
thus, by his very errors, the superior order and nobler des- 
tination of his being ; a being which, when that instinctive 
craving is enlightened, when that instinctive ambition is 
directed to worthy objects, is capable of becoming a reflection 
of all that can be conceived as the attributes of a Grod. 

On this superiority of nature let the humblest of human 
beings place his foot firmly ; and thence, by cultivating 
those natural powers, the possession of which give him his 
rank in creation, strive to rise in virtue and in self-respect 
daily, whether he receive aid from without or not There 



AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 105 

are many unfavourable circumstances, no doubt, especially 
the want of moral training in infancy, and the evil training 
you receive from bad people in childhood, which make the 
task of many of you very difficult ; and therefore, where 
they exist, render you objects of compassion, and make it 
the imperative duty of those who have the power to do so 
to amend your circumstances ; but, while those circumstances 
do not make your task impossible (which nothing but in- 
sanity or idiotism can do), they do not release you from 
your natural responsibility. 

A responsibility which is increased by living in a partly 
civilized country, in which, however far from perfect its 
standard of morals may be — however lamentably its national 
education may be neglected, yet the general voice of indig- 
nation against great crimes expressed by penal laws and 
public punishments, and the general disapprobation of dis- 
orderly conduct evinced by the difficulty which disorderly 
persons find in getting employed, must greatly assist the 
natural powers of the human mind in forming an approxi- 
mation to a just moral common sense, and thus increase 
the responsibility of all who live in a partly civilized country, 
however unfavourable their own individual circumstances 
may be. Even the very necessity which bad people are 
under of perpetrating their crimes in secret, is a species of 
moral training to themselves and to their unhappy children. 

Now, though no want of aid from without can release 
any human being from his natural responsibility, yet a few 
words of plain advice from any friend who, possessing leisure, 
may have studied the subject, would very greatly assist 
you all in forming a moral common-sense from those mate- 
rials which you possess within your own minds. Let me 
be that friend ; let me endeavour to give you, as far as I 

f 5 



106 AN ESSAY ON STATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

am able, those few words of advice which, I can honestly 
say, I am prompted to offer you by one of the very faculties 
I owe to that human nature which I share with you — namely, 
the natural impulse which makes us desire each others 
happiness. 



CHAPTER II. 

Cultivation of the moral faculties in adults. 

If then, instead of forfeiting the self-respect which, in 
the first instance, you have a right to found on the possession 
of your human nature, you would greatly increase it, and 
cause it to grow into an approving conscience, representing 
the approbation of God, and entitling you to the respect 
and love of all good men, you will, notwithstanding your 
having been neglected in childhood, now, with your adult 
powers of mind, cultivate in yourselves, and cause to be 
cultivated in your children, the moral and intellectual fac- 
ulties which are necessary to the formation of a perfect 
moral-sense or enlightened conscience; and which will 
thus teach natural conscience, or the natural instinct which 
craves for your own approbation, when you ought to ap- 
prove and when you ought to disapprove of yourselves. 

Your being poor and devoid of book-learning need not 
prevent your doing this ; the plainest advice will, as I have 
said, put the most unlearned in the way of setting about so 
desirable a work. 



AN ESSAY ON NATUEAL RESPONSIBILITY. 107 



CHAPTER III. 

Cultivation of benevolence. 

Each of you can, for instance, cultivate the natural instinct 
of benevolence, by doing eveiy kindly, every obliging action 
in your power, and by seeking occasions to do such. For 
this purpose it is not necessary to be rich enough to give 
away money or goods ; there are a thousand other ways 
of contributing to the happiness and relieving the sufferings 
of our fellow-creatures, especially in the family relations, 
where the mere soft word, the kindly expression of coun- 
tenance, and the cheerful tone of voice are the daily sweet- 
eners of life, spreading a happiness and a sunshine around 
the cottage in which they dwell, that all the rank, the 
learning, and the riches in the world, cannot give without 
them. The costly pleasures you cannot afford, but gentle 
and obliging manners, and kindly words and looks do 
not cost anything; why should they be banished from 
the dwellings of the poor ? Why should the poor wilfully 
deny themselves and their amilies such real and natural 
blessings ; which not only do not deprive the person who 
gives them of anything, but which on the contrary, which 
he is giving them, fill his own bosom with a glow of satis- 
faction which disposes him each time more and more to do 
the like again. Nor is this feeling, as I have already 
pointed out, accidental ; it is, as I have told you, God 
himself inducing you to be kindly and benevolent, by the 
promptings of your human sympathies and the pleasure 
you feel in obeying them ; while he has given to your un 
derstanding the natural faculties which take notice of this 
and remember it, that you may feel encouraged by your 



108 AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

own experience to do the like again, and so diffuse li appiness 
around you and be happy yourselves. 

Observe here the great difference when it is a mere 
animal instinct Avhich you obey ; the moment you carry its 
gratification beyond its lawful limit — as for instance, when 
you eat or drink too much — your understanding takes notice 
of the evil consequences which are produced ; and there- 
fore, instead of encouraging you to repeat such acts, warns 
you against them by your own experience. And when it is 
another person who suffers in consequence of what you 
have done wrong, your human sympathy of benevolence 
murmurs, and makes your conscience refuse to approve of 
you, which makes you uncomfortable. So that it comes to 
this, that there is no real lasting pleasure to be had out of 
doing a wrong, either to yourselves or to any one else. 
This is a law of nature, and there is no use in straggling 
against it. All the human beings in the world put together 
have not strength enough to upset one law of nature. 

Can you stop the revolving seasons, or prevent the al- 
ternations of night and day ? 

The faculties of the human mind are characters in which 
the Mind which traced the laws of nature has legibly written 
this commandment : — Happiness shall be attained through 
moral order only. 



CHAPTER IV. 

Cultivation of veneration, or admiration of goodness. 

You can also, without riches or learning, cultivate the 
natural faculty which, when it admires goodness, prompts 
your instinctive desire of your own approbation to urge you 
to make efforts to resemble what you admire. 



AN ESSAY OX NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 109 

This you can do by habitually thinking about, and talking 
over with your families, all the good, and kind, and just, 
and generous actions and people you have ever heard of, 
and then trying to form the idea in your own minds of these 
good qualities, carried to the greatest degree of perfection 
you are able to conceive ; and this you will be able to do 
without any learning, by looking within your own minds, 
and dwelling on the thought ; for God has given you all 
the natural faculties necessary to enable you to form to 
yourselves this idea of the greatest possible goodness, or of 
a real, perfect God, whom your mind camiot help admiring 
intensely (which is worshipping) as soon as it sees the idea. 

Not because the Great Mind of the universe, like an 
earthly prince, wants your worship to increase his glory, 
but because he knows that worshipping goodness will make 
you strive to be good. 



CHAPTER V. 

Design and contrivance visible in the metaphysical laws of mind. . "' 

Volumes have been written to point out the evidences 
of design in physical creation. Here is design as manifest 
as ever was displayed by mechanical contrivance however 
admirable. First, the revelation of the idea of perfect 
goodness, which the power of conceiving the idea brings 
before the mind ; then, the natural impulse which cannot 
choose but admire this revelation ; then, the natural in- 
stinct which craves for our own approbation, but which, 
having seen this revelation, cannot grant its entire appro- 
bation to anything short of this high standard, and, therefore 
presses continually on the will to urge our whole being 
forwards towards perfection. Here the mental machinery 



110 AN ESSAY OX NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

with its mechanical contrivances, and the great motive or 
moral propelling power are both visible, as it were, to the 
naked eve ! 

"When the finite imitates the Infinite, the distance in 
degree must, of course, be immeasurable. But it is the 
assimilation in nature, despite the distance in degree, which 
renders it ennobling to the mind of man to set itself to the 
great "work of imitating the goodness of God. The immen- 
sity of the distance but opens before the soul an eternity of 
progress. 

Some of the well-meaning among the poor Chinese, who 
have not been taught any religion, and who are thus with- 
out any holy object of worship to inspire them with a 
veneration for goodness, strive to supply this deficiency by 
putting up in their houses the picture of some very wise 
and virtuous old man, before which they constantly burn a 
lamp as a mark of respect. 

This seems to be an instinctive effort to enlighten and 
stimulate natural conscience ; for, when the instinct which 
admires is thus induced to reverence goodness, the mstinct 
which craves for your own approbation prompts you to 
imitate what you reverence. 



CHAPTER VI. 

Advantages of metaphysical instruction to the unlearned. 

Despite the popular prejudice, that of all studies meta- 
physical ones are the most difficult for the human mind to 
grapple with, and require the deepest learning and the 
greatest amount of leisure, the love of truth and the sincere 
desire to do good compeLme to believe, and to declare my belief, 



AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. Ill 

that, on the contrary, the study of our own minds by means 
of consciousness, the convictions arising out of this study, 
and the practical application of those convictions to conduct, 
form a means of cultivating the moral faculties and elevating 
the human mind, which is peculiarly adapted to be the 
resource of those who have neither the leisure nor the op- 
portunity to become learned. It is a resource which may 
be made available even to those who cannot read, if such 
persons, instead of wasting their time and their earnings in 
public-houses, were persuaded by worthy neighbours to 
attend the meetings of mechanics' institutions of an evening, 
where they might hear short essays on such subjects read 
aloud, and also hear lecturers who could direct their attention 
to their own minds, and make them observe their human 
sympathies and human instincts moving Within them, so 
that they must feel sure that they do possess such, and then 
compel their understandings, by the plainest illustrations, 
to confirm every right impulse, as they led them to follow 
out the consequences of actions, till they arived at the 
irresistible conclusion that happiness cannot be attained but 
through moral order ; taking care to keep always in view 
the main fact — namely, that the powers of mind by which 
they get at this conclusion are natural to the human species, 
and are to be found, in a greater or less degree of activity, 
in every human breast. For the great advantage of thus 
convincing every individual, and especially the unlearned, 
by thier own consciousness, of the absolute existence, within 
their own minds, of a certain set of natural instincts and 
natural powers, out of which, when attended to and compared, 
certain moral and religious convictions and obligations grow 
as naturally as the stem and branches of a tree from its 
roots, is, that such convictions can never afterwards be 



LI 2 AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 

shaken. No arguments nor scoffs could persuade any being 
however simple, however unlettered, however unprotected 
by all other answering arguments, that convictions thus 
arrived at were but the mistakes or the fabrications of other 
persons, pressed upon them hj superstitious zeal or undue 
authority. Each individual must know that the revelation 
had been made to his own mind ; nor would he need any 
library to pursue the subject, for the materials for study 
would be within his own breast ; nor would his inability to 
read books prevent his thus reading his own thoughts, and 
talking them over with others similarly situated. 

Such discussions would furnish each individual with 
additional convictions, that the human instincts and human 
sympathies which he would thus find that all felt more or 
less, and the rational conclusions he would find all were 
thus, in dispassionate moments, disposed to come to, must 
really be natural to the human soul. While the general 
approbation, which in moments of calm converse all are 
ready to grant to the kindly and just impulses would tend 
to raise, in such assemblies, a public opinion in favour of 
virtue, and a stronger sense of the responsibility consequent 
upon the possession of their human nature : a responsibility 
which they would find, in trying to converse, that common 
parlance, by the consent, as it were, of a common instinct, 
acknowledges when it uses the expressions "inhuman" and 
''unnatural," to indicate cruelty, or unkindness, or even the 
absence of kindness. 

When such convictions were thus arrived at, those to 
whom religious instruction had been given could not fail to 
feel a strong internal evidence that inspiration must have 
dictated the written revelation, which, in conformity with 
this natural revelation, kindly addresses the poor, and calls 



AN ESSAY ON NATURAL RESPONSIBILITY. 113 

little children to its bosom to tell them to "love as brethren, 
to be pitiful, to be courteous, and to do unto others as they 
would that they should do unto them ;'" together with an 
equally strong internal evidence that all fierce, cruel, in- 
tolerant doctrines which are opposed to this perfect image of 
a good and merciful God are but " the devices of men," and 
that all warfare, whether religious or political, except in 
the strict defence of our own homes, or of the homes of 
those who are unable to defend themselves, is the most 
gigantic, the most all comprehensive of human crimes. 



AN ESSAY 



ON TEE 

NATURAL ORIGIN OF CONVENTIONAL LAWS 
AND DISTINCTIONS. 



CHAPTER I. 

In the former part of this Essay I spoke of benevolent de- 
sign as apparent in the nature and arrangement of the 
human faculties ; showing you that those faculties and the 
laws which govern them are calculated to lead to the preva- 
lence of moral order and consequent happiness ; and that 
the moral disorder which exists proceeds, as directly as does 
physical disorder, from neglect or perversion of the laws of 
nature, all of which, the mental as well as the physical, 
bear evidence both of design and of the benevolent charac- 
ter of that design. 

But you would ask me, perhaps, why, if God loves us all 
and wills our happiness, he did not make us all rich and 
prosperous ? He did not, my friends, make any of us rich 
or prosperous in the common acceptation of the term — that 
is, in conventional wealth, set apart for our peculiar use. 
How that state of things gradually grew out of the neces- 
sity of labouring the earth to obtain her fruits, I shall show 
you as we proceed. In a much more enlarged sense, how- 



CONVENTIONAL LAWS AND DISTINCTIONS. 115 

ever, tlie Designer and Author of the Universe has made 
us all rich. 

He has given to us all the earth, the air, the water, the 
sunshine, the fruits, the herbs, the animals, the birds, the 
fishes, the fractifying changes of the seasons, and limbs to 
labour the bosom of the earth, and by that labour to in- 
crease and to appropriate her fruitfulness. He has given 
to us all the stupendous laws of outward nature, with their 
wonder-working powers ; and he has given to us all a men- 
tal faculty which I have already described to you, and winch 
enables us to perceive the connection between causes and 
their effects, by means of which faculty we can adapt those 
great wonder-working laws to our daily uses, and make 
them, as it were, our servants, our giant slaves I appropriating 
their strength as though it belonged to our own limbs ; as 
you all know we do with respect to steam power, and the 
power of fire in boiling the water and generating the steam, 
and the powers of the winds in propelling the sails of ves- 
sels or of windmills, and of water in turning watermills, 
together with ten thousand other laws of nature which we 
can adapt, though we cannot change, and which we adapt 
the more securely believing they will not change. 

He has given to us all natural and social ties, and he has 
given to us all the natural laws of our inward being, con- 
sisting of the moral and intellectual faculties and human 
sympathies and human instincts which I have already de- 
scribed to you, and by the right adaptation of which to those 
natural and social ties, we can cause those ties to become the 
sources of the highest order of felicity. Indeed, your own 
understandings must perceive, if you recall what was said 
in the former part of this Essay, that if you adapted those 
laws of mind to their proper purposes with the same faith 



116 AX ESSAY ON THE NATURAL ORIGIN OF 

and regularity that you adapt the powers of steam, or wind, 
or water to whatever you want, them to do, that moral order 
and happiness would result as certainly as does the moving 
of the machine or the turning of the mill. 

But to return to the enumeration of our sources of hap- 
piness or true riches. God has given to the face of nature 
beauty and magnificence, and to the mind of man a faculty 
which delights in the contemplation of such. He lias given 
to the voice of nature sweet somids ; the note of the bird, 
the hum of the bee, the murmur of the wave, and to the 
ear of man susceptibility to pleasing sounds ; while to the 
voice of man himself he has given all the elements of har- 
mony, and to his mind faculties for arranging such into the 
expression of his emotions and sentiments, ancl of thus draw- 
ing from such arrangements of sounds enjoyment of a higher 
description than that derived from the perception of mere 
harmony. To the flower, the herb, the spice, he has given 
aromatic odours ; to man a sense to which such are pleasing. 
To the fruit, the plant, and all that nourishes life, he has 
given various flavours; to man a sense to which such 
flavours and such varieties are agreeable. 

The vigorous movements of the limbs for exercise, and 
even for necessary labour, within due bounds, give rise to 
pleasureable sensations, and are conducive to health ; while 
the repose required after exercise, as well as sleep itself, 
become new sources of comfort and delight. But observe, 
that to enjoy all this, which, to people accustomed to live in 
a civilized country, where every one is under the protection 
of the laws, seems to be scarcely more than the common 
order of nature, the highest cultivation is necessary, not 
only of the earth and of all physical nature, but also of our 
own moral and intellectual being. To enjoy even a small 



CONVENTIONAL LAWS AND DISTINCTIONS. 117 

portion of those blessings there must have been a good 
deal of previous bodily labour bestowed on the earth and 
its fruits, and a very considerable share of social order 
established. The actual state of some uncivilized tribes 
would throw great light on this subject, and prove not an 
unprofitable or uninteresting study for evenings on which 
your meetings were devoted threading. Such reading would 
show you that there are countries where, although the 
whole land is as yet unappropriated, the wretched, naked, 
scattered inhabitants are all in such a state of abject 
poverty, that they wander about scraping in the hollows 
of old trees for worms with which to allay the cravings of 
hunger. 

You would, perhaps, ask why the whole land being, as I 
have said, unappropriated, there are no corn-fields to reap, 
no cattle to kill, no fruits to gather, no vegetables to collect? 
It is precisely because the whole of the land is unappro- 
priated that there are no such resources. When everything 
belongs to every one, there cannot be anything to be pos- 
sessed by any one : for this reason, that no one likes to 
take the trouble of cultivating and sowing a field when he 
knows that every one who chooses can take away the crop, 
and that he should not have one ear of wheat more than 
those who had been too lazy to work, unless he could also 
fight and scramble for it better than his neighbours. In 
like manner, no one will take the trouble to catch -wild 
cattle, and make fences and sheds to preserve them ready 
for his use, in a country where everybody else could take 
them from him, and that he should be constantly obliged to 
risk his life fighting in defence of the property he had 
thus endeavoured to appropriate; while, after all, greater 
numbers could always overpower himself and his family. 



118 AN ESSAY ON THE NATURAL ORIGIN OF 

Such is, at present, the actual state of things among such 
savages as, without the protection of laws, attempt to collect 
anything like comfort around their dwellings. By such 
unhappy people the yell of the approaching savage is 
nightly listened for ; and when he arrives, the roof of the 
helpless family is fired, their cattle and their young women 
carried off, their men and their old women slaughtered. 

But could not all the inhabitants of such a country, you 
will naturally ask, come to a mutual agreement that they 
should each of them cultivate some fields, make fences and 
sheds for cattle, build a cottage and plant a garden round 
it, for the comfort of themselves and their families ; and 
that all would flock to the assistance and defence of any 
one from whom another should attempt to take away the 
property he had thus created and appropriated by the labour 
of his hands ? 

They certainly could and ought to do so ; and such an 
agreement would constitute a law for the establishment and 
protection of private property, which is the first step towards 
civilization ; and from this moment no one could take to 
himself anything he had not earned by his labour without 
being dishonest, and incurring the risk of losing his life by 
the hands of those whose rights he had invaded, and whose 
comfort he had endangered, by breaking the compact which 
had been entered into for the advantage and tranquility of 
all. And now, under the shelter of this law, every one 
would soon see the advantage of cultivating a portion of 
ground for himself, and his wife and children, and the face 
of the country would change from that of a desert to that 
of a garden. But some would be more industrious than 
others, and more frugal in the use of their crops ; and those 
prudent people would find, when winter came on, that they 



CONVENTIONAL LAWS AND DISTINCTIONS. 119 

had stores of provisions more than sufficient to feed their 
families, while the others, who were less industrious and 
more wasteful in their habits, would find that they had not 
enough to carry them through the winter. These latter 
would then be obliged to offer a part of their piece of land 
in exchange for food to those who had made the large 
stores. Those persons obtaining thus more land, would 
have the means of making still larger stores the next year; 
and those who thus lost a part of their land would be 
reduced to still scantier stores. Thus differences of condi- 
tion would commence, and, in time, some would have no 
land left, while others would have more than they could 
labour themselves. Those who, thus, had no land, would 
now be obliged to offer to do some of the extra work for 
those who had a double quantity, on condition that they 
would give them a share of food in return. Thus would 
arise labouring on other people's land, or being what we 
call day labourers. 

Some would now propose the expedient of working on a 
part of another man's land, which we call a farm, on the 
condition of giving the owner of the land a part of the 
produce, and keeping the rest as payment or wages for the 
labour of him who did the work; and thus would arise 
what we call rent, and the class we call farmers. 

Those who had not any land, and who could not find 
land to hire, or work to do on the land of others, would 
now be obliged to endeavour to make themselves useful in 
some other way by helping those who had food to give them 
in exchange for their labour, to build a better sort of houses, 
or to make a better sort of furniture, or of clothing, &c. 
The arts of civilized life would thus begin to appear. And 
now something to perforin the office of our money — that is 



120 AN ESSAY ON THE NATURAL ORIGIN OF 

to say, some token that one man owed another so much 
food, or that another owed him so much labour ; in short, a 
circulating medium would become necessary. Those who 
were industrious and frugal would now begin to make stores 
of this circulating medium, and become what we call 
moneyed men. 

Then those who had been idle, or extravagant, or unfor- 
tunate, and who had therefore, neither money nor land, and 
who could not find among those who had food or money to 
give in exchange for labour any necessary work to do, would 
be obliged to endeavour to invent something ornamental or 
agreeable, to tempt those who had thus become rich to 
give them food or money in exchange for this ornamental 
work, and thus would luxury commence. And now people 
would begin to perceive, that by buying materials and work- 
ing them up by their labour into something which they 
could sell for more money than the materials cost them, 
they would have a profit on their labour. These persons 
would borrow money to buy materials, and, as an induce 
ment to those who had the money to lend, offer to pay 
sometlr ng for the use or hire of it ; and thus lending money 
on interest would commence, and people with stores of 
money, or large possessions in land, would gradually leave 
off doing any part of their own work, in which indolence 
they would necessarily be encouraged by the persons who, 
having neither money nor land, were anxious to be em- 
ployed and paid for their labour; and thus a prejudice 
would arise in favour of the rich not doing any work, and 
they would thus be induced to bring up their children deli- 
cately, educate them more or less, and leave them their 
property when they were dying. Until, in fine, without any 
violence or injustice being done, society would advance 



CONVENTIONAL LAWS AND DISTINCTIONS. 121 

towards the complicated state of things which exists at pre- 
sent in our own country. And now, people who had thus 
by their own industry or that of their forefathers been 
secured leisure both from labour of body and from anxiety 
of mind, would devote themselves to learning and to the 
improvement of arts and sciences. Here, again, those who 
had industry and application would excel others in whatever 
they undertook, and new distinctions would arise. 

Thus, you see, it was not God who gave to one of his 
children more land, more money, a finer house, finer clothes, 
or more leisure to become learned, than to another ; it was 
being more industrious and more frugal at the first which 
originated all these differences. Xow if the advance of 
civilization were not retarded by warfare or false worship, 
but that, on the contrary, the moral and intellectual faculties, 
and human instincts, and human sympathies, which I have 
described to you, were cultivated, and the people instructed 
in the worship of a benevolent God, and thus taught to 
reverence goodness and love one another, the worthy and 
compassionate among those who had become rich would 
begin to feel that those who had fallen into poverty, whe- 
ther by misfortune or by their own or their parents' fault, 
must not, if they could not find work, be allowed, in the 
meantime, to suffer want ; so they would meet together and 
make a law that every one who possessed property should 
contribute in proportion to that property some share to sup- 
port those who had neither land nor money, and who could 
not get work. 

Thus would commence a Poor Law. 

The benevolent and intelligent portion of this commu- 
nity would now also begin to consider that a man who had 
enough to do to support his family by his labour when he 

G 



122 AN ESSAY OX THE NATURAL ORIGIN OF 

-was in health, must be very ill off when he was sick or met 
with any accident; they would accordingly found general 
hospitals, fever hospitals, casualty hospitals, &c. &c. &c ; 
and thus would gradually arise the multitudes of benevolent 
institutions which we see everywhere around us. 

Then, those benevolent persons observing that the know- 
ledge of a good and benevolent God, and the reverence for 
goodness which this knowledge inspires have a great effi- 
cacy in- making people good and benevolent, and therefore 
in promoting moral order and consequent happiness, they 
would make a law, that all persons having property should 
contribute towards the sum necessary to pay a sufficient 
number of well-instructed persons to devote the whole of 
their time to teaching every one to love and reverence a 
good and benevolent God; thus, a church establishment 
would arise. 

Those intelligent and benevolent persons would also per- 
ceive that it was very difficult for those who had to work 
hard to procure enough to eat, to educate their children ; 
they would, accordingly, agree that those who had property 
should subscribe yet another portion of that property to 
establish schools, in which the children of those, who were 
too poor to pay for the education of their children should 
be educated without paying anything. 

Now, how could these people have done all these things, 
or any of these things, if there had never been a compact 
entered into to protect the fruit of * each man's labour from 
the depredations of his neighbour ; for all property consists 
of labour finished and preserved, whether by the labourer 
himself or byfhis forefathers, in the shape of land, houses, 
gcods, or money? Thus, you see that the laws which 
favour the acquisition, and protect the possession of private 



CONVENTIONAL LAWS AND DISTINCTIONS. 123 

property, are not only indispensable to the cultivation and 
enjoyment of the fruits of the earth, but are also of great 
importance to the development of the mind of man. As 
I have said, you will find the consideration of this subject 
useful ; for, when you are in the habit of knowing and 
remembering how much of your own safety and comfort you 
owe to the protection of the laws of the land, you will feel a 
greater respect for those laws, and be less likely to break 
any of them yourselves, or suffer your children to do so. 
You would do well, indeed, to impress this consideration on 
the minds of your children from the first; it may keep 
them out of much arm. Among the cheap and useful pub- 
lications of the day there are, no doubt, accounts of the 
condition of all savage tribes and nations in the world; and 
persons even who cannot read might, as I have suggested, 
hear those read aloud at the meetings of Mechanics' Insti- 
tutions. Such studies would bring home to your minds a 
strong conviction that, however defective the organization 
of society may still continue to be, no one could desire to 
see it go back to the state of the barren waste and the wan- 
dering savage feeding on worms, or the still more terrible 
one, that of the hourly dread of fire and sword ; and if the 
laws which protect life and property cease to be respected, 
society would return to one or other of these deplorable 
states in a very short time. Views of the horrors of anar- 
chy, and of the helplessness of individual families unpro- 
tected by the existence of good laws, must likewise inspire 
& strong desire for the further progress of social order, 
which further progress can only be obtained by that further 
cultivation of the moral faculties which I have already 
recommended. 

G 2 



121 AN ESSAY ON THE NATURAL ORIGIN OF 

CHAPTER II. 

Instruction and competency lawful objects of pursuit. 

I have anxiously endeavoured in a former part of this 
Essay to convince you that by the cultivation of your moral 
faculties and human sympathies, and those portions of the 
intellectual powers of man which derive their teaching from 
daily experience, it was in your power, without either 
wealth or hook learning, to entitle yourselves to your own 
respect and to that of your fellow-men. But I did not, 
therefore, advise you not to increase your knowledge, and 
improve your condition ; there is a great difference between 
despising yourselves or each other for not possessing the 
advantages of learning or wealth when out of your reach, 
and neglecting to seek them by every honest means in your 
power. 

I asserted also, that the knowledge of the means of doing 
good was the only knowledge which deserved the name of 
wisdom, or was worthy the ambition of conscience ; yet I did 
not, by this assertion, limit the subjects of human research, 
I but elevated the motive with which such researches 
should be ma.de. Let knowledge in every science, adroit- 
ness in every trade, be sought as means of performing our 
relative duties to our families and to society, and all such 
knowledge and such adroitness become means of doing 
good, and their pursuit a religious rite. While he who, 
actuated by this motive, acquires much knowledge, and 
exerts the power which such knowledge bestows in benefit- 
ing his fellow-creatures, thus becomes of all earthly objects 
that which is entitled to our highest veneration. 



CONVENTIONAL LAWS AND DISTINCTIONS. 125 

Nor would anything be more likely to promote speedy 
acquisition of competency, and consequent leisure to becom.; 
learned, than commencing by the practical culture of the 
Moral faculties, which I have thus recommended. Such 
culture will make a man honest, industrious, sober, and 
frugal, as naturally and necessarily as sowing a field with 
wheat causes wheat to grow hi that field. 

A man with such a combination of real virtues almost 
always prospers, because every one is willing to trust hini ; 
every one is willing to employ him ; every one is ready to 
say a good* word of him, and every one must respect him; 
so that, as there is no impassable barrier between classes 
in this country, there would be no saying to what station he 
might eventually rise. 

But observe, that having so risen, his moral faculties, 
with the culture of which I have supposed him to com- 
mence his fortunate career, would show him that as soon 
as he thus no longer required his time to earn his daily 
bread, he could no longer remain unlettered with an ap- 
proving conscience ; for that the privilege of leisure which 
he had acquired had rendered him responsible to the less 
fortunate members of the community, to devote that leisure 
to some study or pursuit by which he might benefit the 
great masses of his fellow -creatures whom he had left 
behind him still struggling for subsistence. Thus, while 
his conscience would prompt him to endeavour especially to 
spread the honest and kindly sentiments which had proved 
so great blessings in his own case, he would be also careful 
to suggest to the public any improvement in agriculture or 
any other useful art, or any discovery in science to which 
his studies might have led, and anxious to study on with 
the same view, because he would not be able to approve of 



126 AN ESSAY ON THE NATURAL ORIGIN OF 

himself without going on ; and the approbation of his con- 
science on these enlightened grounds would, after such 
moral culture, have become as necessary to the comfort of 
his mind as his daily food to the subsistence of his body. 
Thus we see benevolent design in both these instincts. If 
there were no instinct of hunger nor relish for food, the 
body, left in charge of the understanding only, would in 
many cases die of starvation from mere neglect ; and so, as 
I have shown you, would the energies of the soul perish, or 
remain useless, if left to the convictions, however strong, of 
the intellect, without the urgings of instinctive conscience 
hungering for our own approbation, and still excited to new 
efforts by each experience of the placid satisfaction which 
such approbation imparts. 

By this conscientious devotion of human intellect to its 
noblest purposes, thus urged to the task by the cultivation 
of the moral and religious faculties and human sympathies, 
we may hope at length to see every art, every science, 
every branch of human knowledge perfected, and reduced 
to broad comprehensive principles, so simply put that the 
plainest understanding may be able to apply them practi- 
cally to the business of daily life. 

In many of the physical sciences much of this has been 
already done. Thousands are actively employed, applying 
to the benefit of millions discoveries in science resulting 
from the studious labours of a comparatively few indivi- 
duals. These useful discoveries have been made, and thus 
turned to beneficial purposes by first studying and then 
practically adapting to those purposes the great unalterable 
laws of nature. 

Hitherto, however, this has been chiefly done as regards 
her physical powers and their application to mechenical 



CONVENTIONAL LAWS AND DISTINCTIONS. 127 

purposes, by which our bodily comforts have been greatly 
increased. It remains for the present and future ages to 
study with equal care the equally powerful and equally un- 
alterable, but still more important natural laws which influ- 
ence mind, and by adapting them with equal skill to the 
formation of mental habits and dispositions, to promote the 
moral order and increase the consequent happiness of this 
and all future generations as much as discoveries in physics 
and their application have added to the bodily comforts 
and convenience of all classes in the present day, com- 
pared with what their condition was in the savage stages 
of society. 



City fctcani Tress. Long Lane: D. A. Doudney. 



The following Works, hy the same Author, 

FIRST LOVE. 

Novel, 3 Yols. 

FORTUNE HUNTING. 

Novel, 3 Vols. 

DILEMMAS OF PRIDE. 

Novel, 3 Yols. 

PHILANTHROPIC ECONOMY; OR, THE 
PHILOSOPHY OF HAPPINESS. 



Mrs. Loudon is preparing for the Press a Second Series 
of her Essays on Mental Training, §c. 

The following is a summary of the subjects to which the 
light of the mental Jaws will be applied in the Second 
Series of Essays, and which will shortly be published. 

THE FIRST ESSAY 

To showing that the instinctive desire of the soul to rise to the 
highest standard of excellence it knows how to appreciate, however 
frequently misdirected, is the elevating principle of our being — To 
showing that if the highest standard we happen to know be yet a low 
one, there is great danger of the unenlightened instinct resting in such 
— To showing the propelling action of the affections on the will — To 
showing which is the most powerful of these affections, and how to 
make the power of this affection the auxiliary of virtue- — the instru- 
ment for rendering the being pure, kindly, noble-minded, and happy — • 
To showing what instinct gives conscience her propelling energy — To 
showing her energy is distinct from her lights — To showing what are her 
natural lights — what her artificial lights — To showing the importance 
of directing veneration to worthy objects — To showing that the link 
which connects veneration with assimilation is the strongest in the 
whole chain of the mental laws ; for that, could it give way, the soul 
were lost — To showing that love and veneration of goodness is real 
worship — That the instinct which propels to such worship is the uni- 
versal, instinctive, religious principle — To showing that the practical use 
of calling this principle into activity, is the instinctive desire of assimi- 
lation with the object of our worship, which its activity awakens — To 
showing that the mission of this principle is to elevate the soul of man 
to its destined position in the scale of being — To showing that the 
admiration of false glory is an abuse of this principle — That all false 
appreciations of objects of veneration are false religions, and lead, 
accordingly, through instinctive desire of assimilation with the objects 
of our veneration, to false practice — That the greater part of our 
strictly -mental desires can be traced to the elevating principle, however 



Preparing for Press. 

grossly misdirected — The influer.ee of public opinion en this elevating 
principle — The minor functions of the elevating principle produce the 
- decencies and minor charms of social life — A strong instinct placed as 
sentmal over every function of consequence to the preservation of the 
"body, or the elevation of the soul — The importance of directing these 
chief instincts — The limited sphere of the strictly-intellectual faculties 
— The knowledge how to obtain an end does not necessarily make that 
end desired — If not desired, it is not sought — The ruling passion, 
whether good or evil, makes the intellectual faculties its servants — Love 
and veneration of goodness may be made the ruling passion — The 
veneration of children is directed or misdirected by every accidental 
word and incidental circumstance — The influence of exciting senti- 
ments — The affection which most frequently governs the will — The 
restlessness of the soul while its instinctive ambition is misdirected — 
The power of this instinct such that even the infidel cannot escape 
punishment when he rebels against the natural authority of conscience, 
for this instinct compels him to desire that which, while he so rebels, he 
cannot possess, namely, his own respect. 

IN THE SECOND ESSAY, 

ON THE TYRANNY CF FALLACIES — THE LIGHT OF THE 3IENTAL 
LAWS IS APPLIED 

To shewing that crime is hateful to the natural constitution of the 
mind — That the tyrannising fallacy of each age compels the commission 
of many crimes, in spite of the murmurs of the natural symjjcithies — That 
the stream of history is poisoned, and real civilization delayed by the 
approbation or toleration with which those crimes are related by his- 
torians — That the abuse of noble sentiments can alone account for the 
contradiction between man's nature and his conduct — That we arc still 
the slaves of fallacies — That we still sacrifice our children to idols — to 
fake elcry — to false honour — to idle prejudices — That false appreci- 
ations of objects of veneration, and false appreciations of sources of 
happiness, are the two great obstacles to real civilization. 

IN THE THIRD ESSAY, 

ON THE WORSHIP OF FALSE GLORY — THE LIGHT OF TEE MEXTAL 
LAWS IS APPLIED 

To showing that the admiration of false glory is, of all the fake 
appreciations of objects of veneration, that which has caused the greatest 
amount of evil, and prevented the greatest amount of gocd, because it 



Preparing for Press* 

has lowered and distorted the standard of morals, sanctioned the most 
horrible crimes, deceived the sonl's ambition, and thus delayed for ages 
the elevating principle in the performance of its mission — That the 
natural nobility of the misdirected sentiment is proved by the self- 
devotion of its votaries to a supposed great object — its misdirection, by 
their -wanton immolation of the rights and lives of others — That God 
is defied and nature oiitraged when Ave march to the premeditated 
murders of the battle-field, with triumph and with music — That God 
is insulted by the prayers that precede a battle — That the effect of war- 
fare on public morals is baneful in the extreme — That gratitude to th<s 
defenders of the helpless from wanton aggression, being the natural 
origin of respect for the profession of arms, respect should change to 
abhorrence when defence changes to reprisals and offensive warfare — 
That history, music, and painting are rendered instruments of demo- 
ralization when used to represent outrages against God and nature — > 
That days of thanksgiving in our churches, when deeds have been done 
to cause shame and mourning in all who share with their perpetrators, 
a common nature, are insulting to God and demoralizing to man — 
That amid such influences the standard of public morals cannot rise to 
the elevation necessary to awaken the consciences of mankind. 

IN THE FOURTH ESSAY, 

OX THE NECESSITY FOR INTERNATIONAL PARLIAMENTS AND INTER- 
NATIONAL LAWS, THE LIGHT OF THE MENTAL LAWS IS APFLIEO 

To showing that the elevating principle of the soul is still uncul- 
tivated — That the spiritual nature of man is still in its infancy — That 
its development would be favoured by the institution of an international 
Parliament, composed of the chosen representatives of every nation — 
That, from such a central point of -view, legislators would be enabled 
to look around the great horizon of truth, freed from all the partial 
distances created by local prejudices, and discern at length that all men 
are brethren, and all their real interests the same — That seen thus, the 
questions, hitherto the most difficult, would beccme easy of solution — 
That the members of the international Parliament should le consti- 
tuted the trustees of the lives, rights, and entire property of the whole 
family of man — That the code of international laws should recognise 
these fundamental principles, namely, that the natural relation existing 
between human brethren, as established by Gcd, is unchangeable by- 
man— That power is entrusted to bun. an rulers to enforce, not to set 
aside, the lav s of God and nature — That human life is sacicd — That* 



Preparing for Press. 

therefore, neither military nor civil laws can legalize the act of taking 
away life — That the punishment of death lessens the respect for life — 
That the indiscriminate slanghter of the battle-field utterly destroys 
that respect — That the tendency of both is to reconcile the mind to the 
taking away of life, and thus render suicides, duels, and murders, more 
frequent — That the destruction wantonly, as during wars, of any por- 
tion of the whole amount of the real wealth of the entire family of man 
is criminal, to whomsoever the divided portion may individually belong 
— That toleration in matters of religion is conducive to the increase of 
real toorship — That legislators are bound, to give education to their 
people adequate to their wants; and to conduct their educational 
systems on rules deduced from the natural laws of mind — That such a 
code of international laws may reasonably be looked for as a further 
step in civilization, less arduous than that which has already relieved 
each individual baron from the necessity of defending his own castle hy 
force of arms — That the public opinion of a united world, pronounced 
through its representatives in an international Parliament, would prove 
irresistable in preventing appeals to arms — That the splendid spectacle 
of whole nations rejecting the use of the brute force, acknowledging 
each other brethren, and bowing down before eternal justice, would 
awake at once every human conscience, and raise the moral standard in 
each individual breast — That real civilization is impossible while war 
and its attendant outrages are publicly tolerated — That the future 
destinies of the human soul are visible in the power of the human mind 
to conceive perfection — In the elevating influence of the love and admi- 
ration of goodness on the human character — In the reality of the human 
sympathies, and in the beautiful nature of the human affections, and the 
nobleness of the human aspirations, whenever directed arieht. 



A CATALOGUE 



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PUBLISHED BY 



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OBSERVATIONS IN THE SOUTHERN 
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PRIZE ESSAY, 1810. 

HE OBLIGATIONS OF LITERATURE TO THE 
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